data_basol_badnews: Basol badnews - Ch07 - from Basol et al. (2020)
In rcalinjageman/esci: Estimation Statistics with Confidence Intervals

data_basol_badnews

R Documentation

Basol badnews - Ch07 - from Basol et al. (2020)

Description

Climate change? Vaccines? Fake news and conspiracy theories on these and numerous other issues can be highly damaging, but are thriving in this social media age. Trying to debunk a conspiracy theory by presenting facts and evidence often doesn't work, alas. Psychological inoculation, also similar to prebunking, presents a mild form of misinformation, preferably with explanation, in the hope of building resistance to real-life fake news-a sort of vaccine for fake news. The Bad News game is a spin-off from research on psychological inoculation. Basol et al. (2020) assessed the possible effectiveness of this game as a fake news vaccine. At getbadnews.com you can click 'About' for information, or just start playing the game- it's easy and maybe even fun. You encounter mock Twitter (now X) fake news messages that illustrate common strategies for making fake news memorable or believable. You make choices between messages and decide which ones to 'forward' as you try to spread fake news while building your credibility score and number of 'followers'-rather like real life for a conspiracy theorist wanting to spread the word. Compete with your friends for credibility and number of followers. Basol's online participants first saw 18 fictitious fake news tweets and rated each for reliability (accuracy, believability), and also rated their confidence in that reliability rating. Both ratings were on a 1 to 7 scale. Those in the BadNews group then played the game for 15 minutes, whereas those in the Control group played Tetris. Then all once again gave reliability and confidence ratings for the 18 tweets.