Learning & Ethics

Adolescence is a critical life stage in which health skills and behaviours are developed and often carried into adulthood. This makes it an important time to actively teach and support digital health literacy, which includes the skills needed to find, understand, evaluate, and use digital health information. Such support is particularly important given young people's frequent use of digital health information sources and technologies such as social media, where misleading medical information is common [1; 2; 3]. Research shows that critical appraisal skills are often the most challenging aspect of digital health literacy for adolescents, who may also overestimate their ability to evaluate information [4]. Encouragingly, brief, co-designed digital interventions have been shown to improve young people's digital health literacy skills [5; 6].

On the Fence employs a proven educational approach: teaching critical AI, media, as well as health and digital literacy, by having students practice the very techniques they need to recognise and resist. Just like cybersecurity's well-established "Capture the Flag" competitions, where students learn defence by practicing offensive techniques in safe environments, or marketing courses where students create persuasive campaigns to understand consumer psychology, the On the Fence competition provides students with safe AI tools to manipulate a community decision within a completely artificial social media landscape.

Research on cybersecurity education demonstrates that learning by doing with offensive techniques helps students understand concepts, realise their meaning in the real world, and aids in memory retention [7]. This intentional reversal, having students become the manipulators rather than passive observers, achieves learning outcomes difficult to attain through traditional approaches.

The methodology draws on psychological inoculation theory, a framework that shows how exposure to weakened examples of manipulation builds resistance. Research demonstrates that prebunking interventions (where students are pre-emptively exposed to weakened examples of manipulation techniques) can significantly reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures and demographics, improving people's ability to recognise manipulation techniques and discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content [8]. By actively designing agent strategies and crafting narratives, students develop a deep, embodied understanding of algorithmic manipulation that transforms them from potential victims into critical analysts.

This hands-on approach doesn't teach students to be manipulators; rather, it demystifies manipulation itself, inoculating young Australians against these tactics when deployed against them in real life situations.