News Literacy Projects RumorGuard: Teaches about the 5 credibilty factors to look out for when reading a post including, Authenticity, source, evidence, context and reasoning. Many posts are put out there to make people believe they are real and authentic, Rumor guard runs background checks to prove that posts are not reliable. I think this is a great tool for eradicating misinformation.
On the article about Old photos recirculate after National Guard deployed in D.C. a reverse image search was used to prove that the photographs were not taken in August of 2025 like they said they were, the reverse image search showed that the photos were really taken in January of 2021 which means that Donald Trump was not president then and the article was using his name and talking about military presense which makes no sense since he was not president then. https://www.rumorguard.org/post/old-photos-recirculate-after-national-guard-deployed-in-d-c
A big part of RumorGuard is credibilty in almost all of the stories I looked at, the word credibilty kept poping up. Was it posted by a credible source? Was it posted by who it says it was? A lot of times people use fake names, fake profiles, fake photos. RumorGuard gives and displays the tools used to bipass all of the misinformation.
This website gives five steps for vetting a news source, these 5 steps are all great tools to determine the validity of a source. The first one is do a quick search which can be so overlooked, by doing a quick search for information on a news source majority of the time you can find other links and articles that help you determine if what you are reading is facts or made up.
Overall, I really liked RumorGuard it gave a lot of links and helpful information for determining the validity of a source. It is super important to have the tools to set you up for sucess and feel confident that what you are reading and spreading is real information and I felt RumorGuard was perfect for that.
I played the Fake it To Make it game where I created a site. I choose a name for the site and a logo and theme. It gave me a credibility score of 64/100 after I set up the website. I was given $50 to start and had to “purchase” themes and domains and logos the nicer ones would cost more and give more percentage towards the credibilty score of the website. I learned that a lot goes in to creating a website and posting a fake article. If you want it to look believable and fool people a lot more effort, time, and money needs to be put in.
I Made it look credible to the best I could with the money given to me then went and found random articles and pressed the copied article button and then planted the article to get “views” Each time I would plant an article it would show how many views I got and then how much revenue I made off of the article.
On one of the articles I planted I got 332 shares and made $3.14 this game I would say this is a pretty effective tool for teaching about misinformation, not as much as rumor guard was but this game gives you a clear idea of what a fake website looks like and how easy it is to copy articles and plant them for people to read and share.
The most surprising thing to me was the money that gets generated from people viewing and sharing content, It goes to show that a lot of people that spread misinformation are in it for the money and talk that goes with it.
Overall I think this game was effective in learning how to detect fake articles and was fun to mess around with and adjust the settings of credibilty.
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