As an increasing amount of our lives is spent interacting online through social media platforms, more and more people tend to seek out and consume news from social media rather than traditional news organizations.
The reasons for this change in consumption behaviors are inherent in the nature of these social media platforms: it is often more timely and less expensive to consume news on social media compared with traditional news media, such as newspapers or television; and it is easier to further share, comment on, and discuss the news with friends or o Despite the advantages provided by social media, the quality of news on social media is lower than traditional news organizations. However, because it is cheap to provide news online and much faster and easier to disseminate through social media, large volumes of fake news, i.e., those news articles with intentionally false information, are produced online for a variety of purposes, such as financial and political gain. It was estimated that over 1 million tweets are related to fake news “Pizzagate”3 by the end of the presidential election. Given the prevalence of this new phenomenon, “Fake news” was even named the word of the year by the Macquarie dictionary in 2016
