Factitious - Test your News-Checking Skills!

[Gelquie]

So I found this game online (that is, I found it from a shared article here), and it's basically a game where you get short news articles and you have to verify whether or not they're real or fake news. The game was created by a reporter to test just that sort of skill. The game was originally intended for students, but when she realized how widespread the need for this skill was, everyone became the target audience.

Well, that said, the articles themselves have a large basis in American events and politics. But even if you don't know anything about something, you can still pick an article apart, based on decisive naming vs vaguery, how much it relies on sensationalism, how professionally it's written, how well it's sourced, etc.

How well will you do? There's a link to it in the article, but here's an easy link to the game. (Full start requires your email, but quick start doesn't require anything.)

Factitious!

[Gelquie]

Just to keep my results separate from the first post, I reluctantly double-post.

There are three rounds to the game in quick start, and I got a 93%. I missed one that I thought was fake but turned out to be real. (Details will be in a spoiler box in case the game repeats use of articles and thus gives a hint.)

SPOILER: Click to show

I thought one of them was fake because the article kept referencing social media quotes, and I was going "social media is not a good source of information!". But welp. Admittedly, I was kind of on the fence for that one, but the social media thing was why I picked "no".

[Celestial]

Ooh, this is interesting. I am slightly miffed by the fact that it does not allow you to look up the source automatically from the page but that is a nitpick because it's easy to Google that stuff. I did get thrown off by the use of real names and location sometimes, since that's one thing I look for when spotting fake news.

Overall, it's a fun game. :3 Useful too.

EDIT: It is, however, very sad that I only can identify fake news when I see the source as "The Onion". Otherwise the article looks 100% legit, because these are the times we live in.

[Reiqua]

Well, I'm reasonably happy with 80% given I don't even look at the news normally.
It feels kinda like that game Balderdash if anyone knows it - sometimes the real answers are more absurd than the fake ones!

[Killix]

93% for me.
All I had to see was the source name to identify all of the fake articles. XD

[Terra]

Got a 93% out of three rounds total. I'm glad this game exists; it's both fun and educational, the best combination of all! (Though when I'm uncertain about whether something's fake news, I usually not only check where it's published but try to click around the website to see what other articles they publish, as well as see whether the story is corroborated elsewhere. The game itself seems to encourage you to do this when you get your results, but normally things like that feel like cheating when you're playing a game...)

SPOILER: Click to show

The one I got wrong involved a racehorse named "President Trump" being gelded and declared "fake news" because he was too difficult to train and "would not focus on his work." I thought it was satire, and it turned out to be real. I hadn't realized there was an option to check the source, but I don't know if seeing that it came from the Racing Post would've helped me much. Clearly I'm not very knowledgeable about horse racing.

[Breakingchains]

87%.

I think one metric is missing from the results that would be helpful: whether you tended more toward false positives or false negatives. The ones I got wrong were real articles that I thought had to be fake, which tells me I might be skeptical mainly as a knee-jerk reaction rather than as an intelligent response. Which is very different feedback from if I was marking articles from the Onion and "LastLineOfDefense.org" as real.

That said, this is actually pretty great, and presented in a format that might actually reach people who spread nonsense on facebook. xD