Introduction
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VIRUS, DER
Misinformation affects the daily lives of individuals and the functioning of society. During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine-related misinformation has reduced the public’s willingness to be vaccinated (Nuwarda et al., There are various ways to combat misinformation. For example, experts and relevant organizations conduct fact-checks on misinformation (Paynter et al., Among the methods used to enhance individuals’ ability to cope with misinformation, interventions based on inoculation theory have been widely applied because of their short intervention time and scalability. The inoculation theory suggests that injecting a weakened dose of a virus can activate the production of antibodies, and the same process can be applied in the context of information processing (Ecker et al., With increasing research, inoculation interventions have evolved from primarily focusing on the content of information toward the technique behind the information and also from passive to active inoculation (van der Linden, Current misinformation interventions are mainly focused on Western countries. Language and cultural differences in the intervention content also result in a lack of evidence regarding the generalizability of the interventions (Kozyreva et al., Based on the above questions, this study designed an online game called "Distinguishing Truth from Misinformation" on WeChat, which is one of the largest Chinese social media platforms. This study examined whether a game-based intervention could improve the perceived credibility and sharing intention of misinformation compared to a graphic-based intervention.For the present study, we tested the following hypotheses: