Why do people share fake news? Associations between the dark side of social media use and fake news sharing behavior

By Shalini Talwar, Amandeep Dhir, Puneet Kaur, N. Zafar, Melfi Alrasheedy. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2019

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The current study examines the associations of the dark side of social media use and fake news sharing behavior among social media users. A large cross-sectional data from 1022 social media users are collected to test the research model, formulated using social comparison theory, self-determination theory, rational choice theory and seminal work on psychology and communication. The study results suggest that online trust, self-disclosure, fear of missing out (FoMO), and social media fatigue are positively associated with the sharing fake news (intentionally). In contrast, social comparison has a negative association. The study findings also indicate that online trust has negative association with authenticating news before sharing. The study concludes with some implications for policy makers and marketers that could be useful in protecting society and brands from the perils of the misuse of social media and fake news.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d297b3df5c78d60a3fc6c8fcea5c1ad5e1a5ae2e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Amandeep Dhir
2. Shalini Talwar
3. Ayesha Masood
4. Adeel Luqman

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Shalini Talwar
2. Amandeep Dhir
3. Ayesha Masood
4. Adeel Luqman
5. Puneet Kaur

Citations in the corpus

• Social media induced fear of missing out (FoMO) and phubbing: Behavioural, relational and psychological outcomes (2022, unknown): “Third, prior research on phenomena related to the dark side of digitisation and social media has mainly focused on young adults, i.e. university students (Talwar et al., 2020; 2019) and adolescents (Dhir et al., 2019; 2018; Malik et al., 2020).”
• The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic (2020, unknown): “[27] mention that social media users share fake news due to lack of time to authenticate the original resource.”
• Teens’ Motivations to Spread Fake News on WhatsApp (2020, background): “…teens surveyed assure that they do not share information without looking at what it consists of, in addition, they declare that, for this, they have to trust both the information itself and the people with whom the young people are connected in WhatsApp, as pointed out by Talwar et al. (2019).”
• Psychological and behavioral outcomes of social media-induced fear of missing out at the workplace (2021, unknown): “…that can have a problematic impact on individuals; (b) strain: the adverse emotions or states experienced due to the stress; and (c) outcomes: the decrement in performance, productivity, and psychological and physiological functioning of the individual due to the strain (Dhir et al., 2019).”
• Sharing of fake news on social media: Application of the honeycomb framework and the third-person effect hypothesis (2020, unknown): “…use, which includes information overload, social media fatigue, fear of missing out and coping strategies, has intensified (e.g., Dhir et al., 2018a,b; Dhir et al., 2019; Luqman et al., 2018; Malik et al., 2020), the perceptions and behaviours underlying the sharing of fake news are not clear.”
• Does enterprise social media use promote employee creativity and well-being? (2021, methodology): “…extensively by many recent studies, which have, for example, examined psychological well-being (Dhir et al., 2018; Tandon et al., 2020), disturbed sleep and school burnout (Evers et al., 2020), social media fatigue (Malik et al., 2020), and academic performance decrement (Dhir et al., 2019).”