Vote for Turtle: a fun game for spotting disinformation
Your mission is simple: help Turtle win the Annual Best Pet Competition. The catch? You must create a disinformation campaign to manipulate the votes.
As you play the game Vote for Turtle, you will discover common psychological techniques used to manipulate opinions online. Within just five minutes, you will learn how to recognise disinformation in real life and avoid being fooled by it.
Create a disinformation campaign and build your psychological resilience
Disinformation spreads quickly online, and influences opinions before people have a chance to verify the facts. One of the most effective ways to learn to resist manipulation is to experience it from the producers' side.
Instead of simply telling you about disinformation, the Vote for Turtle game lets you create your own disinformation campaign. You will try out common manipulation techniques, making them easier to recognise when you encounter them in real life.
This “learning by doing” approach —sometimes called prebunking— helps players to inoculate themselves against information manipulation.
How to play the online game
Vote for Turtle is intuitive and quick – it only takes a few minutes to complete. Each level introduces you to a different tactic used in real-world disinformation campaigns. Choose between the options proposed and test what has the biggest impact on voters. Try again to win more votes and improve your score.
Six key disinformation techniques to identify
This game focuses on six common techniques used to manipulate audiences. Understanding them can help us think more critically before liking, sharing or believing online content.
1. Emotional language
People are more likely to interact with posts that provoke outrage, fear and disgust on social media.
2. Polarisation
Polarisation boosts the most extreme points of view, leaving no room for the middle ground.
3. Manipulation
Real content presented out of context can be used to manipulate people.
4. Confirmation biais
People tend to be less critical of information that confirms their existing beliefs.
5. Silencing
Aggressive attacks make people think twice about sharing their opinions, silencing parts of the discussion.
6. Flooding
When there’s a lot of noise it’s harder to tell fake from fact. In the end, only the loudest voices are heard.
Finished the game? Try our disinformation quiz!
Put your new skills to the test with our disinformation quiz and see how well you can identify misleading content and manipulation techniques.
Learn more about disinformation
Want to explore the topic further? Discover how disinformation spreads, why it matters and what you can do to protect yourself and others.
