11,810
Views
116
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

Too good to be true, too good not to share: the social utility of fake news

, ORCID Icon &
Pages 1965-1979 | Received 07 Dec 2018, Accepted 14 May 2019, Published online: 05 Jun 2019

References

  • Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236.
  • Barthel, M., Mitchell, A., & Holcomb, J. (2016). Many Americans believe fake news is sowing confusion. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowingconfusion/
  • Basil, M., & Brown, W. (1990). Interpersonal communication in news diffusion: A study of ‘magic’ Johnson’s announcement. Journalism Quarterly, 71(2), 305–320.
  • Baym, G. (2005). The daily show: Discursive integration and the reinvention of political journalism. Political Communication, 22(3), 259–276.
  • Bennett, W. L., & Manheim, J. B. (2006). The one-step flow of communication. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 608(1), 213–232.
  • Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49, 192–205.
  • Bergström, A., & Belfrage, M. J. (2018). News in social media. Digital Journalism, 6(5), 583–598.
  • Berkowitz, D., & Schwartz, A. (2016). Miley, CNN and The Onion. Journalism Practice, 10(1), 1–17.
  • Bobkowski, P. S. (2015). Sharing the news: Effects of informational utility and opinion leadership on online news sharing. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 92, 320–345.
  • Bordia, P., & DiFonzo, N. (2005). Psychological motivations in rumor spread. In G. A. Fine, V. Campion-Vincent, & C. Heath (Eds.), Rumor mills: The social impact of rumor and legend (pp. 87–101). New Brunswick: Aldine Transactions.
  • Bright, J. (2016). The social news gap: How news reading and news sharing diverge. Journal of Communication, 66, 343–365.
  • Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 752–766.
  • Chohan, U. (2018). Parliamentary Oversight and the Fake News Problem: A Singaporean Context. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3151346.
  • Choi, J. (2016). News internalizing and externalizing: The dimensions of news sharing on online social networking sites. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 93(4), 816–835.
  • DiFonzo, N., & Bordia, P. (2007). Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
  • Ellison, N. B., & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through social network sites. In W. H. Dutton (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of internet studies (pp. 151–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Gantz, W., & Trenholm, S. (1979). Why people pass on news: Motivations for diffusion. Journalism Quarterly, 2, 365–370.
  • Goh, D. H., Ang, R., Chua, A., & Lee, C. S. (2009). Why we share: A study of motivations for mobile media sharing. Active Media Technology, 5820, 195–206.
  • Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity. American Sociological Review, 25(2), 161–178.
  • Haney, W., Russell, M., Gulek, C., & Fierros, E. (1998). Drawing on education: Using student drawings to promote middle school improvement. Schools in the Middle, 7(3), 38–43.
  • Hanitzsch, T., & Berganza, R. (2014). Political trust among journalists: Comparative evidence from 21 countries. In M. J. Canel & K. Voltmer (Eds.), Comparing political communication across time and Space (pp. 137–156). London: Palgrave McMillan.
  • Harber, K., & Cohen, D. (2005). The emotional broadcaster theory of social sharing. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 24, 382–400.
  • Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2, 261–280.
  • Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: New York University Press.
  • Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263–291.
  • Kang, H., Bae, K., Zhang, S., & Sundar, S. S. (2011). Source cues in online news: Is the proximate source more powerful than distal sources? Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(4), 719–736.
  • Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications. New York: Free Press.
  • Khaldarova, I., & Pantti, M. (2016). Fake news: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict. Journalism Practice, 10(7), 891–901.
  • Kim, H. S. (2015). Attracting views and going viral: How message features and news-sharing channels affect health news diffusion. Journal of Communication, 65, 512–534.
  • Knobloch-Westerwick, S. (2015). Choice and preference in media use: Advances in selective exposure theory and research. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Knopf, T. A. (1975). Rumors, race and riots. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
  • Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2000). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied researchers (3rd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Kümpel, A. S., Karnowski, V., & Keyling, T. (2015). New sharing on social media: A review of current research on news sharing users, content, and networks. Social Media & Society, 14, 1–14. doi: 10.1177/2056305115610141
  • Lazarsfeld, L., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1948). The people’s choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Lee, C. S., & Ma, L. (2012). News sharing effect in media: The effect of gratifications and prior experience. Computers in Human Behaviour, 28, 331–339.
  • Liu, J. (2017). Mobile phones, social ties and collective action mobilization in China. Acta Sociologica, 60(3), 213–227.
  • Ma, L., Lee, C. S., & Goh, D. H. (2011). That’s news to me: The influence of perceived gratifications and personal experience on news sharing in social media. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 141–144.
  • Ma, L., Lee, C. S., & Goh, D. H. (2014). Understanding news sharing in social media: An explanation from the diffusion of innovations theory. Online Information Review, 38, 598–615.
  • Metzger, M. J., Flanagin, A. J., & Medders, R. B. (2010). Social and heuristic approaches to credibility evaluation online. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 413–439.
  • Mishler, W., & Rose, R. (2001). What are the origins of political trust? Testing institutional and cultural theories in post-communist societies. Comparative Political Studies, 34, 30–62.
  • Mitchelstein, E., & Boczkowski, P. J. (2013). The news gap: When the information preferences of the media and the public diverge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Mutz, D. C., & Young, L. (2011). Communication and public opinion. Public Opinion Quarterly, 75(5), 1018–1044.
  • Nelson, J., & Taneja, H. (2018). The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption. New Media & Society, 1461444818758715. doi: 10.1177/1461444818758715
  • Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., & Sundar, S. S. (2015). Posting, commenting, and tagging: Effects of sharing news stories on facebook. Computers in Human Behaviour, 44, 240–249.
  • Onwuegbuzie, A. J., Dickinson, W. B., & Leech, N. (2009). A qualitative framework for collecting and analysing data in focus group research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(3), 1–21.
  • Papacharissi, Z., & Rubin, A. M. (2000). Predictors of internet use. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 44(2), 175–196.
  • Prasad, J. (1935). The psychology of rumour: A study relating to the great Indian earthquake of 1934. British Journal of Psychology, 26, 1–15.
  • Rochlin, N. (2017). Fake news: Belief in post-truth. Library Hi Tech, 35(3), 386–392.
  • Rosnow, R., & Fine, G. A. (1976). Rumor and gossip: The social psychology of rumor and gossip. New York: Elsevier.
  • Rosnow, R. L., & Kimmel, A. J. (2000). Rumor. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology (Vol 7., pp. 122–123). New York: Oxford University Press and American Psychological Association.
  • Sandelowski, M. (2008). Theoretical saturation. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The sage encyclopedia of qualitative methods (Vol. 1) (pp. 875–876). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G. L., Varol, O., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2017). The Spread of Fake News by Social Bots. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592
  • Shibutani, T. (1966). Improvised news: A sociological study of rumor. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
  • Subramanian, S. (2017). Inside the Macedonian fake-news complex. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
  • Sundar, S. S. (2008). Self as source: Agency and customization in interactive media. In E. A. Konijn, S. Utz, M. Tanis, & S. B. Barnes (Eds.), Mediated interpersonal communication (pp. 58–74). New York: Routledge.
  • Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1975). The reluctance to transmit bad news. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental social Psychology (Vol. 18., pp. 193–232). New York: Academic.
  • Trilling, D., Tolochko, P., & Burscher, B. (2017). From newsworthiness to shareworthiness: How to predict news sharing based on article characteristics. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 94(1), 38–60.
  • Turcotte, J., York, C., Irving, J., Scholl, R. M., & Pingree, R. J. (2015). Opinion leaders: Effects on media trust and information seeking. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20, 520–535.
  • Vargo, C., Guo, L., & Amazeen, M. (2017). The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016. New Media & Society, 17(6), 874–897.
  • Vasu, N., Ang, B., Teo, T.-A., Jayakumar, S., Faizal, M., & Ahuja, J. (2018). Fake News: National Security in the Post-Truth Era. Policy document for the Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Retrieved from https://www.rsis.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PR180313_Fake-News_WEB.pdf
  • Veenstra, A. S., Hossain, M. D., & Lyons, B. A. (2014). Partisan media and discussion as enhancers of the belief gap. Mass Communication and Society, 17(6), 874–897.
  • Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
  • Wardle, C. (2017). Fake news. It’s complicated. First Draft. https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79
  • Weeks, B. E., & Garrett, R. K. (2014). Candidate rumors, and vote choice during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 26(1), 401–422.
  • Weeks, B. E., & Holbert, R. L. (2013). Predicting dissemination of news content in social media: A focus on reception, friending, and partisanship. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 90, 212–232.
  • Weening, M. W. H., Groenenboom, A. C. W. J., & Wilke, H. A. (2001). Bad news transmission as a function of the definitiveness of consequences and the relationship between communicator and recipient. Journal of the Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3), 449–461.
  • Wilkinson, S. (2004). Focus group research. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method, and practice (pp. 177–199). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Xiong, Y., Cheng, Z., Liang, E., & Wu, Y. (2018). Accumulation mechanism of opinion leaders’ social interaction ties in virtual communities: Empirical evidence from China. Computers in Human Behavior, 82, 81–93.
  • Zubiaga, A., & Ji, H. (2014). Tweet, but verify: Epistemic study of information verification on twitter. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 4(1), 1–12.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.