Disinformation
This week in my Journalism course, I was tasked with a couple of fun activities that challenged my ability to distinguish between reliable and unreliable news sources. In order to do this, I had to play two games about misinformation and reflect on my scores afterward.
My experience playing the first game, Fakey, was very stressful. I was so much worse than I had assumed myself to be. Every other article that I would interact with in a positive way would lower my skills. At one point, I tried to go through as many articles as possible without looking at my scoring, and I was horrified to see how much worse I was doing than I had presumed.
The other game, Bad News, was quite delightful. I found a lot of joy in getting to mess with the instructor a bit and see what responses I could get to my posts. A big aspect of the game that I enjoyed was getting to see all of the different titles that I could collect. I found the wittiness of the options very funny, and I thought it was a bit easier to understand where the education comes into play, as opposed to the previous game.
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Overall, I had quite a good time getting to experiment with different ways of learning and interaction with lessons, even if that meant getting a bit humbled after seeing my results. I suppose that I am not the perfect misinformation detector that I presumed myself to be. And, although it was tough to realize in the beginning, I think that it is a good thing. This means that I will take more time to analyze what I am reading and where it comes from, as opposed to jumping to different conclusions and potentially excluding good sources or using disinformation to make claims.
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