Real post or fake?
Every post here is made up, but every trick is real and turns up often in UAE group chats. Spot the tricks in each post, then learn the quick checks that catch them.
The single best habit is a pause
If a post makes you angry, scared or excited, wait one minute. Then look for the same news from an official account or a known news outlet before you share it.
The 12 tricks, and how to check each one
You'll meet all of them in the game.
Sources: charts with a cut-off axis: Darrell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics" (1954); Pandey and others, "How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?" (CHI 2015); Correll, Bertini and Franconeri, "Truncating the Y-Axis: Threat or Menace?" (CHI 2020). The petrol chart uses invented prices (AED 2.84, 2.86 and 2.91 a litre): the rise is 7 fils, about 2.5%, but the axis starts at 2.80, so the last bar looks almost three times taller than the first. They are not real UAE prices, which the UAE Fuel Price Committee sets each month. Checking habits: the United Nations "Pause" campaign (Verified, 2020), which asks people to stop before they share; the SIFT method (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to the original) by Mike Caulfield; and lateral reading research by the Stanford History Education Group (Wineburg and McGrew, 2019). In the UAE, spreading false news is an offence under Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021 on Combating Rumours and Cybercrimes. Official weather warnings come from the National Center of Meteorology. All posts, accounts, people, numbers and brands in the game are invented.