Debunk the misinformation hiding in the news.
Ten of today's stories. Pick one and click the lines where the reasoning breaks. Three wrong calls ends the round.
About the News Fallacy Detector
The News Fallacy Detector puts you in front of realistic news-style headlines and story summaries and asks you to find the reasoning error buried inside. Some stories lean on a scary correlation, some quote an authority speaking outside their expertise, some bury a false choice in the framing — your job is to name the trick before it names your opinion.
This is media literacy as a practiced skill rather than a slogan. Studies of misinformation consistently find that the same handful of rhetorical patterns power most misleading coverage: cherry-picked statistics, causation conjured from correlation, fear doing the work of evidence. Once you have spotted each pattern twenty times in a game, you start spotting it for free in your actual news feed.
How to play
- 01
Pick a story from the front page — ten of them, written the way real outlets write, not obviously fake.
- 02
Read the article and click any line where the reasoning breaks. Most lines are perfectly sound, which is the point.
- 03
Every click resolves instantly, naming the fallacy and explaining why that sentence fails. Three wrong calls ends the round.
- 04
Finish to see what you caught and what slipped past you, then take another story.
What you practise in this mode
Every round pulls from our library of reasoning errors. Read the full guides to lock in what the game teaches you.
Appeal to Fear
Alarm as a substitute for evidence — the engine of most viral bad news.
READ THE GUIDE →Appeal to Authority
"Experts say" — but which experts, on what evidence, in whose field?
READ THE GUIDE →Correlation vs. Causation
The workhorse of misleading health and economics headlines.
READ THE GUIDE →How to Spot Misinformation
The full step-by-step checklist this game turns into reflex.
READ THE GUIDE →Want the complete reference? Browse all 30+ logical fallacies with definitions and examples, or explore the cognitive bias guides.
Why this format works
Inoculation research — "prebunking" — shows that exposing people to weakened doses of manipulation techniques builds durable resistance, more durable than fact-checking individual claims after the fact. Each round here is a controlled dose: you see the technique, name it, and watch it lose its grip.
Practicing on news-shaped content also transfers directly. The skill you build is not abstract logic; it is the specific ability to read a headline that says "Study links X to Y" and automatically ask what the study actually measured, who ran it, and whether Y was going to happen anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Are the news stories in the game real?
They are realistic but fictional — written to mirror the structure, tone, and tricks of real coverage without spreading actual misinformation or targeting real outlets and people.
What techniques does the News Detector teach me to spot?
The rotation covers the most common patterns in misleading media: appeal to fear, appeal to authority, correlation-causation confusion, cherry-picked data, hasty generalization from small studies, false dilemmas in framing, and loaded emotional language.
Is this game useful for students studying media literacy?
Yes — it pairs well with classroom units on source evaluation and misinformation. Each explanation names the technique in standard terminology, so it maps cleanly onto media literacy curricula and our written guides.
How is this different from a fact-checking site?
Fact-checkers verify individual claims after they spread. This trains the upstream skill: recognizing the structural tricks that misleading stories share, so you can be appropriately skeptical of a brand-new claim no one has checked yet.
Try another mode
Turn this into a real-world skill.
Spot the Fallacy gives you a structured learning path, gamified progress, and offline practice so you can spot flawed reasoning with confidence.
