A Quasi Experiment on the Effectiveness of Social Media Literacy Skills Training for Combating Fake News Proliferation

Abstract

This study experimented the effect of social media literacy skills training as an intervention strategy for combating fake news. We carried out a quasi-experiment in one public university in Nigeria and randomly divided 480 participants into equal parts to form a control and experimental group. The respondents in the experimental group were exposed to 8 weeks of training to improve their social media literacy skills to fight fake news. We realised that social media literacy skills training is effective in increasing social media knowledge, users’ recognition of fake news, their tendency to verify information, and reduce the inclination to share false news since users exposed to social media literacy training can differentiate between accurate and made-up news compared to their counterparts who were not exposed to the same training. Implications for research and practice were discussed.

Keywords:

• Combating fake news
• fake news
• intervention strategy
• social media literacy skills
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used is confidential.

Additional information

Funding

Funding project: 1.2022 Hubei Provincial First-Class Undergraduate Course "Radio Program Editing and Production" Project [No. 730]. Research on the Training Model of Excellent Journalism and Communication Talents Based on School Media Cooperation [No. WL202103].

Notes on contributors

Xiao Xu

Xiao Xu, Yangtze University College of Arts and Sciences. The main research areas are film and television culture, digital media, and film and television communication research.

Yinan Huang

Yinan Huang is at Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Malaya. Her research interests lie at media platform, social media and communication, digital journalism.

Oberiri Destiny Apuke

Oberiri Destiny Apuke is one of the best communication scholars in Nigeria (2019–2022), and part of the top 500 scholars in Nigeria according to SCOPUS Scival. He is a lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication, Taraba State University, Jalingo, Nigeria. He holds a PhD in Communication from the Universiti Sains Malaysia.