🚨 THIS IS NOT #FAKENEWS! 🚨

A well informed populace is a foundational element of democracy, and recently that foundation has fallen under siege. Regardless of political lean, about two thirds of U.S. adults say completely made-up news “causes a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.” Instead of sitting idly by, we created Fake News: The Game to fight back against the global pandemic of misinformation.

Stemming from our collective frustration with fake news’ ability to spread like a virus, and after seeing the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, and The Washington Post create and promote instructive resources; we decided to take a fresh approach to help increase news literacy… by creating a game people might actually want to play.

Fake News: The Game is now available in the app store for any iOS device. We also published Fake News as an Alexa Skill (and it’s arguably more fun than the arcade game). Try it out.

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How Does It Work?

We’re populating our database daily from a variety of sources, namely Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org and serving them up for you to swipe left if it’s real, and swipe right if it’s fake. Its like Tinder… but for, you know, the health and well-being of democracy. We’ve also included references to key resources, as well as ways to engage with organizations such as The News Literacy Project.

Fake News: The Game is a native iOS mobile application built on Swift and designed to work across all currently supported Apple devices running iOS 10 (and soon 11). “News” items are entered into a Django-powered admin panel that is loaded into the app on startup via an API. After a user plays a game, we record anonymous usage data so we can improve gameplay, and draw additional insights using various business intelligence (BI) and data analysis tools like Firebase and PeriscopeData.

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What’s Next?

We’ve already received a ton of interest and great suggestions (e.g. adding in levels, selecting themes/categories) and have heard from multiple bars who can’t wait to install the game themselves. Based on user and game-play performance, we’ll soon be able to publish data/insight on what types of #FakeNews headlines people are most susceptible to believe (across a demographic and geographic breakdown).

Play the game, get on the global leaderboard, and let us know what you think!

Note: we recently came across similar games built by American University’s game studio (check out Factitious) and another in partnership with PolitiFact (check out PolitiTruth).

 
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