Bad News vaccinates players against fake news by making them tycoons of it

Bad News began as a bet that the best defence against misinformation is not another fact-check but a vaccine. Researchers at Cambridge's Social Decision-Making Lab, led by Sander van der Linden, had shown that a mild, demystified dose of propaganda tactics could build psychological resistance, and they wanted a format that could reach millions instead of a lecture hall.

With the Dutch media collective DROG they built a short browser game in which players run a fake-news empire. The player starts with a small Twitter account and grows it by publishing polarizing falsehoods, deploying bots, deflecting fact-checkers and floating conspiracy theories, while keeping a credibility score so the deception stays persuasive. A snarky narrator scolds any hesitation or lapse into nuance.

The design deliberately forces the player to try both left- and right-wing angles, so the lesson is about the mechanics of manipulation rather than any single ideology. The game's creators describe the goal as vaccination: once you have seen the tactics from the inside and used them yourself, you build up resistance to being fooled by them in the wild.

The game launched in February 2018 and spread quickly, passing one million plays. Cambridge found that one play reduced players' perceived reliability of fake news by an average of 21% compared with a control group, that the effect could persist for months, and the format was later adapted into Go Viral!, a pandemic misinformation game built with DROG and the UK Cabinet Office.