This activity helps young people and youth workers to explore how disinformation spreads online — and how to build resistance against it.

• Recognise common techniques used to spread misinformation online.
• Strengthen your critical thinking and media literacy.
• Reflect on how youth work can promote information resilience and digital responsibility.

Get inspired

Take action: activities for different roles

• Young people can independently play the game, reflect on their experience, and explore how online media influences their views and communities.
• Youth workers can use the game as a tool to facilitate workshops, promote media literacy, and open discussions about truth, trust, and influence.
• Youth organisations can reflect on how they address media literacy strategically, and how to design engaging educational experiences using digital tools like Bad News.

Suggested follow up activities include

1. Become Disinformation Detective and Analyse Real Posts Together: Find real-world social media posts or news headlines and analyse them using the manipulation techniques learned in Bad News (e.g. emotional language, impersonation, polarisation). Use current examples relevant to your group’s context and aim to practice the identification of disinformation tactics in the wild and build critical thinking skills in young people.
2. Create Your Own (Fake) News Campaign and Then Debunk It: Challenge your participants to create a short fake news campaign using memes, headlines, or tweets, based on the Bad News game-play techniques. Then ask each group to present it and debunk another group’s campaign. You can even document the created campaigns and counter-strategies as a toolkit or mini-exhibition to be held in your youth organisation. Aim to reinforce learning through creativity and role-switching in young people who can try to be both “creators” and “critical analysts.”
3. Design a Peer Awareness Campaign on Disinformation: Use what was learned in Bad News to co-create a campaign (e.g. TikTok videos, posters, Instagram stories, or a workshop) in which your young people can educate their peers on how disinformation spreads and how to resist it. Use this activity to help youth link this to real-world activism or school/community engagement by using real life examples from your local environment. Aim towards encouragement of peer-to-peer learning and empowering youth as media literacy ambassadors.

Claim open badge recognition

• Media and information literacy
• Understanding online manipulation techniques
• Using games for digital learning and youth empowerment

Who created this resource?