NewsFeed Defenders: the iCivics news literacy game today

iCivics, the civics education nonprofit founded by Sandra Day O'Connor, announced NewsFeed Defenders in October 2018. It was created with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the home of FactCheck.org and Annenberg Classroom, and built by Filament Games, a developer with a long partnership with iCivics. The target group runs from secondary school students to adults.

The idea starts from a plain observation: fake news, propaganda, rumors and advertising dressed as news make it hard to tell fact from fiction. News literacy, as the Center for News Literacy describes it, means being able to tell fact from rumor, news from advertising, news from opinion, and bias from fairness. The game turns the response into a job. Players take charge of Newsably, a news aggregation site, and have to protect its integrity while still attracting readers.

Players pick the focus of their Newsably feed from three options: Student Life, Health & Wellness, or Sports & Entertainment. They start as a guest user and work up to site curator, with a new challenge each day. A typical decision is whether to report a suspicious post as a violation, for example one promising free tuition for everyone, whether to run an odd story in a feed about student life, or whether to feature a trending post about a new pop album. Others involve investigating a viral claim before it spreads.

Along the way the game teaches how to spot viral deception, how to tell when advertising poses as news, how to notice bias in word choice and framing, how to apply journalistic standards, and how to verify information and images. It was released free to play online, with apps for the Apple and Google stores.

The old game address on icivics.org forwards to a page on the iCivics resource platform titled Play NewsFeed Defenders - News Literacy Game. The page describes the game as a way to sharpen students' news literacy, set on Newsably, a fictional social media site. Students learn the elements of high-quality journalism and the markers of deceptive posts, including hidden ads, viral deception and false reporting.

The page also lists an Extension Pack for teachers, with activities, a mini quiz, a downloadable lesson plan, an assignable student handout and Google Slides. The current page does not state a price or age range in the text read for this article, so the free access announced in 2018 is not restated as a present fact. The game is recorded as playable.