The ninth-graders had 45 minutes to work their way through a maze of misinformation. It was an “escape room,” a kind of game where winning entailed spotting manipulated images and charts, unreliable sources and “deep fakes” — computer-generated video or audio that has people saying things they never said.
The Ballard High School students, broken into teams, pored over materials pulled out of manila envelopes, posted around the room and called up on their computers. “Anybody see mismatched earrings?” asked one teen, looking for a telltale clue in a strip of portraits. Other students scrutinized a video of a supposed scientist announcing glowing study results of a reputed wonder drug, and then another video with the same scientist saying the drug proved a dismal failure.
Some teams struggled. Others raced through each round of clues. But they all seemed to get the point, expressed by one young man in his team’s post-escape discussion: “You can fake anything on the internet.”
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