The Adam Weishaupt Society was a project I started in October of 2007. The Society was a web community organized around a game of misinformation. The goal was to create fake news, and then observe reactions to it.

Players joined one of several cells, which functioned like teams. To function, a cell needed several people of varying talents who could work together to produce and distribute a "news masquerade". The writer would come up with the text for a news article. The goal was to be absurd, but still believable. Then someone who was more graphic-oriented would find or design an image to support the story. Someone else would then take this information and format it like a newspaper web page. Then a fourth person would distribute the article to relevant communities and monitor discussion about it.

At the end of each "round" (a unit of game play which is about two weeks long), players would collect screen shots of the "buzz" about their fake news. Then each cell would vote on the best buzz of the round. The competition was to see who could provoke the most interesting or colorful discussions about our disinformation.

I measure the game as a success on two levels

• A few of our articles received attention from major bloggers. For an example of one article that was "discovered", google "Man dies playing Halo 3".
• It provoked some excellent discourse about the constructed and subjective nature of actual news.
• It was an excellent avenue to learn about memetics and the ways that information can affect large numbers of people.

The Adam Weishaupt Society has 112 members. The game officially stopped in January of 2008 as the community shifted focus to other large projects such as OMGASM. Some members continue to create and propagate fake news for their own entertainment.

see also: Whose Side Are You On? - http://www.aws-om.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=63