Fake News on Social Media: Predicting Which Media Format Influences Fake News Most on Facebook

Abstract

Video and audio fake news formats distributed on Facebook in the form of dis/misinformation have caused so much fear, and panic, and received unpleasant reactions among users. This study adopted a comparative experimental design to test the hypotheses by varying the valence, thus types of formats or modalities, the educational levels, credibility, and sharing intentions of the participants, thus, 2 (video vs audio formats) ×2 (credibility vs sharing intentions) × 2 (literate vs. illiterate) to predict the specific media format(s) that influence the spread of fake news on Facebook among users in Ghana. The participants (N = 340) for this study were recruited from the three municipalities in Accra the national capital of Ghana. The research design regarding data sources was carried out in the form of a street intercept survey method. The findings show that users of Facebook believed and shared video formatted fake news than audio formatted. Further analyses indicate that the educational levels (literacy and illiteracy) variables that influence the spread of fake news on Facebook were not consistent. Besides, an in-depth theoretical explanation for modality effects when viewed from the perspective of mobile media, the study has proposed some theoretical and practical implications.

Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review

“…According to researchers of this category (Parikh and Atrey 2018;Fraga-Lamas and Fernández-Caramés 2020;Hasan and Salah 2019;Masciari et al 2020;Bakdash et al 2018;Elhadad et al 2019;Yang et al 2019b), forms of fake news may include false text such as hyperlinks or embedded content; multimedia such as false videos (Demuyakor and Opata 2022), images (Masciari et al 2020;Shen et al 2019), audios (Demuyakor and Opata 2022) and so on. Moreover, we can also find multimodal content (Shu et al 2020a) that is fake news articles and posts composed of multiple types of data combined together, for example, a fabricated image along with a text related to the image (Shu et al 2020a).…”

“…The effects of these forms of fake news content vary on the credibility assessment, as well as sharing intentions which influences the spread of fake news on OSNs. For instance, people with little knowledge about the issue compared to those who are strongly concerned about the key issue of fake news tend to be easier to convince that the misleading or fake news is real, especially when shared via a video modality as compared to the text or the audio modality (Demuyakor and Opata 2022).…”

Rumours. Who believes them?

“…The study also did not consider the Impact of media format on respondents’ propensity to assume the veracity of false rumours. There is ample evidence that the format of rumours, including subject lines, use of graphics or photographs and other format aspects, has an impact on the ability to identify true and false rumours (Baptista and Gradim, 2020; Demuyakor and Opata, 2022; Yin and Zhang, 2020) and these factors may work in tandem with source ranking by recipients of rumours (Kim and Dennis, 2019). Also important, and not considered, may be content attributes such as frames, emotion and rationality (Song et al , 2021) and presentation style features (Zhang et al , 2015).…”

Not all Fake News is Written: A Dataset and Analysis of Misleading Video Headlines

“…Apart from dataset research, previous works focus on detecting multimodal fake news by including multimedia features such as false videos, images, audio, and caption Masciari et al, 2020;Demuyakor and Opata, 2022;McCrae et al, 2022). However, these works feature general forms of fake news (i.e., deep-fake videos), not misleading headlines.…”