- Accuracy discernment – the ability to distinguish a real headline from a fabricated one.
- Sharing discernment – the willingness to refrain from distributing false information.
Key Findings
Indonesia
- Players of Gali Fakta showed a significant increase in sharing discernment, meaning they became less inclined to forward false headlines.
- The Western-made Harmony Square produced no measurable improvement in either accuracy or sharing discernment among Indonesian participants.
- Indonesian users rated Gali Fakta as considerably more engaging than Harmony Square.
United States
- Both Harmony Square and the English-language version of Gali Fakta boosted accuracy and sharing discernment compared with the control.
- American players did not rate one game as more engaging than the other; engagement levels were similar for both titles.
How the Games Work
The two digital interventions differ sharply in tone and mechanics. Gali Fakta simulates a WhatsApp-style group chat in which users receive messages from fictional relatives and friends, mirroring the peer-to-peer channels that dominate information exchange in Indonesia. Players decide in real time whether each item is credible, encouraging a communal approach to verification.
Harmony Square, by contrast, places the user in the role of “Chief Disinformation Officer” in a fictional American town. Through satirical tasks—spreading rumors, employing trolling tactics, and stoking partisan conflict—the game seeks to expose the strategies behind online manipulation so players can recognize them later in real news feeds.
Engagement Drives Impact
Across both countries, higher self-reported engagement predicted larger gains in discernment. In other words, the more immersed a participant felt while playing, the better that person became at identifying and rejecting falsehoods afterward. The authors argue that cultural familiarity appears to fuel this engagement: a game that reflects everyday communication habits is more likely to hold attention and, in turn, alter behavior.
Why Culture Matters
The results suggest that format and social context can determine whether a prebunking tool succeeds outside its country of origin. Indonesia’s strict laws and social norms discourage openly spreading false claims, which may make role-playing as a disinformation agent—central to Harmony Square—uncomfortable or unrelatable for local users. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s information ecosystem leans heavily on private messaging, so a chat-based interface such as Gali Fakta aligns naturally with day-to-day experience.
In the United States, where public political debate is more common and satire is a familiar vehicle for commentary, both formats resonated. The U.S. sample also replicated an earlier observation: conservative respondents were generally less accurate in identifying false headlines. That ideological pattern did not arise in the Indonesian group, where social and religious identities, rather than a left-right spectrum, more often define political divides.
Limitations and Next Steps
The authors caution that the study focused only on immediate post-game performance. Future research will need to examine whether the improvements persist over time and whether similar results emerge in other regions. Additionally, each country was shown its own set of headlines, making direct comparison across nations difficult. The sample may also over-represent people already interested in misinformation topics, as volunteers opted in to a study explicitly about media literacy.
Even with those caveats, the data challenge assumptions that successful digital interventions can be translated wholesale into new languages and cultures. Instead, designers may need to adjust tone, narrative, and interface to local norms if they hope to achieve sustained impact.
Broader Context
The concept behind both games comes from “inoculation theory,” first proposed by social psychologist William McGuire in the 1960s. Similar to a medical vaccine, the idea is to expose users to a weakened form of deceptive content so they develop cognitive resistance before facing full-blown misinformation. According to the Nature article, such prebunking strategies have shown promise in multiple Western studies, but evidence from non-Western populations has remained scarce until now.
Implications for Policymakers and Educators
The findings may inform governments, NGOs and social platforms seeking scalable tools to curb false information. Interventions that embed familiar communication styles—such as messaging apps in regions where they dominate—could offer a cost-effective path to improvement. Conversely, programs that rely on humor, irony, or partisan framing may require substantial adaptation before they can be expected to work beyond their original cultural setting.
For education ministries looking to integrate media-literacy content into school curricula, the study underscores the importance of local testing and user feedback. Simple design changes that enhance relevance and engagement may yield greater behavioral change than wholesale adoption of a proven but culturally distant program.
The research team plans to explore longitudinal effects and to replicate the experiment in additional countries with distinct media ecosystems. Such work could identify common design principles that translate broadly, as well as elements that must remain culture-specific.
Until that evidence is in, the current data point to a straightforward lesson: when it comes to inoculating the public against misinformation, one size does not fit all.
