The Misinformation Game

A social-media simulator for research.

The Misinformation Game is a free and open-source social-media simulator built to study how people interact with information on social-media. To achieve this, The Misinformation Game simulates a social-media feed for research participants. Participants are shown fake social-media posts, either one at a time or in a feed format. Participants may then react to the posts and their comments. The Misinformation Game has been designed to be highly customisable so that a broad range of tightly controlled experiences can be created for participants. This customisability is a core focus of The Misinformation Game, to facilitate the research of a wide array of social-media related questions. You may read more in our paper.

v2.3.1 has been released with a fix to allow the delaying of users in single-post mode. Read More

Try it Out! #

If you would like to experience participating in a study created using The Misinformation Game, you can access an example game from the example game page.

Screenshot of the user interface within a game.
Figure 1. Screenshot from an example game.

What is Recorded? #

The Misinformation Game records a wealth of information about how each participant acts within studies. If you would like to view example results that were recorded, we provide results from a user experience study on the example results page. Additionally, all information recorded by The Misinformation Game is described in detail in the Results documentation. The results that are recorded for your study will depend upon how your study is configured.

Screenshot from the example results.
Figure 2. Screenshot from the example results.

Watch #

The following video shows the experience of participants taking part in a study made using the Misinformation Game. If you’d like to experience this study yourself, you can access it through the example game page. In fact, we recommend you try it yourself, to get the full experience!

Figure 3. Video of playing through the example study.

Getting Started 🚀 #

If you are new to the tool, or you would like a refresher on its use, we recommend that you read our Getting Started Guide. This guide is a great place to learn the most important concepts for using The Misinformation Game effectively for your research.

The paper The (Mis)Information Game: A social media simulator also provides an in-depth introduction to the Misinformation Game, alongside results from two validation studies that were conducted to test it. If you use The Misinformation Game for your research, we would really appreciate it if you cited this paper!

Get Started!

Documentation #

The Misinformation Game has extensive documentation to help you use the tool. This documentation ranges from high-level guides on the use of The Misinformation Game, to reference guides for configuring studies and interpreting their results.

Some highlights from the documentation:

Read the Docs

Cite Our Work #

We would appreciate it greatly!

@Article{Butler2023,
title={The (Mis)Information Game: A social media simulator},
url={https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02153-x},
doi={10.3758/s13428-023-02153-x},
journal={Behavior Research Methods},
issn={1554-3528},
year={2023},
month={Jul},
day={11},
author={Butler, Lucy H. and Lamont, Padraig and Wan, Dean Law Yim and Prike, Toby and Nasim, Mehwish and Walker, Bradley and Fay, Nicolas and Ecker, Ullrich K. H.}
}