Fighting Against Fake News Using the Card Game "Follow Me"

The paper presents Follow Me, a Slovak card game developed by Impact Games for secondary school students, designed to build critical thinking and resistance to fake news through simulated social media dynamics. Written by researchers at the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, the study argues that fact-checking alone is insufficient against misinformation, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed more activity online and intensified the so-called infodemic. Educational games grounded in inoculation theory are positioned as a flexible and engaging complement to traditional instruction.

The analysis is a qualitative content review of the game's mechanics rather than an empirical test. Players act as ordinary social media users trying to gain followers while maintaining credibility, sharing news cards that are either factual or hoaxes across four domains: health, science, geopolitics, and society. Action cards such as Original Content and Fact Check, along with Event cards that prompt cooperative evaluation, are identified as the main vehicles for teaching how to spot warning signs like missing authors, illegitimate websites, and expressive or error-ridden writing. The authors emphasize that the game does not assign players to "good" or "bad" roles, and they highlight its information-dense design as a reflection of real social media environments.

The paper acknowledges several limitations. The game has not yet been tested on a larger sample, its replayability is constrained by a finite set of 46 news cards that players may memorize, and its rules are initially complex enough to cause frustration. The authors also stress the importance of a teacher serving as playmaker, guide, and evaluator, with a structured debriefing of roughly an hour and a half. Localization is limited, as the print version exists only in Slovak, with online preprints in English, Croatian, and Slovenian. The authors conclude that future work should use pre- and post-game experiments to measure whether the game actually improves players' ability to recognize fake news.