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Elden Fake News

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Budapest Business Journal

idea

In recent years it has become harder and harder to tackle the dangerous world of fake news. These fake news have a negative effect on our societies distorting our perceptions, disrupting our democracies, and destroying economies and businesses, too. Budapest Business Journal (BBJ) has launched a new campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of fake news, and to emphasize the importance of fact-checking when it comes to media consumption. BBJ – being one of the most trusted and informed business magazines in Eastern Europe – wanted to educate the next-generation of decision-makers and businessmen on a platform they are most familiar with: the epic world of Elden Ring Game. Elden Ring is a well-known game with millions of users. It provided a perfect platform to address younger people, and make them realize the dangers of fake-news in an immersive in-game experience. The game allows players to leave messages on the ground thus helping others to find hidden paths. However, this feature creates opportunity for the trolls to deceit the community, making players lose important items in one of the toughest games ever made. That’s why we invited popular gamers and streamers to fact-check information within the game, so they can alert other players to avoid the most popular fake messages left behind. By tracking gameplay trends, and tracing misleading message hotspots we created a guide to avoid these "outlets" of fake information in the game. And we shared that guide on major internet forums, so users could download it. The campaign was a huge success in the gaming community; due to the influencers who contributed to testing the game, millions have been reached and played with the game, and experienced the negative effects of fake news. This is the most successful Budapest Business Journal campaign ever. 427% increase in traffic to the Budapest Business Journal website. 314% growth in consideration amongst young adults.