Sanjay Johnson

Abstract:

Widespread fake news online and in social media has become a major concern since the 2016 election. While numerous studies have been done analyzing susceptible groups and how the spread of misinformation can be reduced, very little has been done to look into how teenagers, possibly one of the most at-risk populations, respond to false news statements. This research looks into how teenagers perceive the accuracy of news statements of varying levels of truthfulness. Survey research was done to compare teenagers abilities to identify levels of truthfulness with other related factors that may influence said abilities. Teenagers were asked to rate the truth levels of news statements and their responses were matched against a credible fact checking website. It was found that some factors such as exposure bias and source of news influenced how teenagers perceived the accuracy of the news statements. Ultimately, teenagers as a whole had one major trend of overwhelmingly identifying statements of all truth levels as centralized ratings such as half true. This indicates a clear hesitation to fully disbelieve or believe most of what they see online and as a result keeps teenagers extremely uninformed. Future research should look into deeper understandings of how exposure bias and news source impacts teenagers’ perceptions as well as what causes teenagers to be unable to pin a statement as fully true or false, and how this problem can be remedied.