By Evelyn Hammel

Misinformation poses one of the most prevalent threats to modern political discourse. Its manipulation techniques are unique and ever evolving, present in the media surrounding elections and international politics and reaching more into marketing schemes and public relations as of late. Whether the goal is to gain profit or sow dissention, misinformation is sometimes effective without us even realizing it.

Psychologists have adopted a theory that parallels medical vaccination science seeking to combat the effects of misinformation and residing continued influence effect of specific types of manipulation. This inoculation theory claims that individuals, once exposed to smaller, more controlled doses of misinformation, can be equipped with a certain level of resistance to the fallacies and manipulation present in today’s media and on social media platforms. There are critiques of course that question the longevity of such inoculations claiming that instead of presenting individuals to sources of misinformation, they should be exposed to the manipulation techniques and popular fallacies themselves that underpin the creation of most misinformation (Lewandowsky). As inoculation theorists and social psychologists adapt to accommodate for a more “broad-spectrum” immunity, content has been created to create greater accessibility and exposure to such material.

Harmony Square is one of these inoculation-based games. Players take on the role of recently employed “Chief Disinformation Officer” (CDO) in the fictional town of Harmony Square and learn as they go the successful techniques of misinformation. Throughout the game, players can visually assess their success as CDO in the interaction that their posts attract.

The software was developed by various offices within the United States Department of State and Department of Homeland Security in collaboration with Tilt and the University of Cambridge. According to its homepage, it was created “within the scope of addressing foreign adversarial propaganda and disinformation and its impact on foreign audiences and elections overseas” with an expressed goal to “work as a psychological “vaccine” against disinformation.” It is the first inoculation game to be attached to a federal agency or governmental institution.

I began my career as CDO of Harmony Square recently, and having played similar games with parallel content, I analyzed it to be adequate in education and exceptional in relevance.

Harmony Square’s greatest strength is its relevancy. In a fictitious town with three competing political parties, the headlines and posts parallel US political conflict without invoking accurate depictions of polarizing current events. Research in inoculation theory has found that intervention relying on real-world misinformation can offend participants and be harmful to a lasting education, and Harmony Square balanced both this necessary vagueness and relevancy in an artful effective manner.

One important pillar in an effective inoculation is wide scale exposure to popular misinformation techniques. Most of these approaches aim to mobilize emotion and destabilize rationality in those of us who consume the “information.” Harmony Square dedicated an entire chapter to emotional manipulation, and players are taught how to monopolize triggering buzzwords such as abuse, corruption, lies, and similar themes in the verbiage of their posts. The creators of the game focus specifically on the power of anger and fear and the role these emotions play in mobilizing irrational action and radicalizing the opinions of the readers.

I believe tools like these are especially pertinent to a holistic inoculation against misinformation in various fields and the game does great work in addressing prevalent critiques of inoculation claiming that the exposure tends to be too issue specific. Instead, Harmony Square employs a higher quality of misinformation education and encourages individuals to build up their alert system against such techniques across the board.

Throughout the game, four other manipulation techniques are employed. These include trolling, escalation of division, amplification and utilization of conspiracy theories. While I feel these are important tactics behind common misinformation tactics, I did feel as though Harmony Square could have added more content.

It would be helpful to have included more depth on astroturfing, or the exaggerated appearance of wide scale support of content through “sock-puppet" websites or bots. Astroturfing is one of the more advanced methods of misinformation dissemination by “legitimizing” false material, and while Harmony Square encourages players to pay for bots to reinforce their posts, the explanation of the technology behind this tactic was absent. By providing a more robust commentary on the amplification technique, players could learn more about the pervasiveness of such bots and how to identify sock puppet accounts and sites.

Harmony Square demonstrates an advanced inoculation method, satisfying the greater need for accessible, approachable content for various age groups and people groups. Inoculation theory and the efforts to combat misinformation have largely existed in a void, filled with modern political science and psychology’s research and studies but absent of public attention and awareness. The misinformation campaigns plaguing our media today go largely undetected or unaddressed, and the progress made by Harmony Square and similar games attempts to create the bridge between these two realms.