Social Media Fake News: A Review of Case Studies and Psychology

Abstract

As the amount of digital consumption people intake has increased, so has the fake news problem. Much of news has turned from magazines and newspapers to online news sites. Unreliable sources online emerge among official news sites and produce fake news. With bots and fooled people, fake news is spread extremely fast on social media. There are many reasons in psychology that explain and provide reasons behind how people believe fake news and spread it on social media. Understanding this can cause us to be able to slow the spread of fake news as well as the amount of fake news believed by people. Detecting fake news is beneficial to stopping fake news spread, as less people will be fooled by fake news and unreliable sources. There have been many detection approaches developed over the years to combat fake news on news sites and social media. The purpose of this review is to analyze the psychology behind fake news spread on social media and detection research of fake news on social media and from official news outlets.