Developing fake news immunity

In this workshop we provide citizens with tools to navigate mis-/dis-information in a critical way and improve their decision making processes during the pandemic and beyond. As part of our ESRC funded project “Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity” we developed a multi-player chatbot that teaches people how to recognize rhetorical strategies that are used to spread misinformation. In this way, people become their own fact-checkers. We will begin by explaining the different information manipulations on the internet and then divide the participants to smaller groups to play with our chatbot. We believe that playing together is more powerful than individual learning, because people can debate, consult and understand together. After this we will reconvene and discuss what we learned, how the chatbot contributed to their understanding of misinformation and what can be improved.