An Analysis of People’s Reasoning for Sharing Real and Fake News

The problem of the increase in the volume of fake news and its widespread over social media has gained massive attention as most of the population seeks social media for daily news diet. Humans are equally responsible for the surge of fake news spread. Thus, it is imperative to understand people’s behavior when they decide to share real and fake news items on social media. In an attempt to do so, we performed an analysis on data collected through a survey where participants (n= 363) were asked whether they were willing to share the given news item on their social media and explain the reasoning for their decision. The results show that the analysis presents several commonalities with previous studies. Moreover, we also addressed the problem of predicting whether a person will share a given news item or not. For this, we used intrinsic features from participants’ open-ended responses and demographics attributes. We found that the perceived emotions triggered by the news item show a strong influence on the user’s decision to share news items on social media