Fake news and its perception among Young Spaniards: the inuence of socio-demographic factorsLas fake news y su percepción por parte de los jóvenes españoles: el inujo de los factores sociodemográcos doxa.comunicación | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | 19January-June of 2023ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978How to cite this article: Gómez-Calderón, B.; Córdoba-Cabús, A. and López-Martín, A. (2023). Fake news and its perception among Young Spaniards: the inuence of socio-demographic factors. Doxa Comunicación, 36, pp. 19-42.https://doi.org/10.31921/doxacom.n36a1741Bernardo Gómez Calderón. Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism at the University of Malaga. He researches journalistic genres, political communication, specialised journalism and social media. He has over 70 publications to his credit, including articles, books and book chapters. Since 2001 he has participated in national and regional R&D projects uninterruptedly. Since 2020 he has been the principal investigator in the R&D Project “e use of social networks by young Spaniards: incidental consumption of news, technological constraints and credibility of journalistic content” (Ministry of Science and Innovation). He is the Coordinator of the Master in Research on Media, Audiences and Professional Practice in Europe and, since 2001, Director of the Department of Journalism at the UMA.University of Malaga, Spain[email protected]ORCID: 0000-0002-9245-9251Alba Córdoba-Cabús. Research Sta in Training with a University Teacher Training contract (FPU) in the Department of Journalism at the University of Malaga. Graduate in Journalism (2016) and Master in Research (2017), both with Extraordinary Awards. She is a member of the “Journalism and Communication Studies Group” (SEJ-067) and participates in a national R&D&I project (Ref. PID2019-106932RB-I00). She has nearly fty contributions in publications with an impact index, including articles in journals –El Profesional de la Información, Estudios Sobre el Mensaje Periodístico or Icono14– and book chapters –in publishers such as Dykinson, Tirant lo Blanch or Pirámide–. She has also defended some thirty papers at international conferences, participated in a PIE, and carried out a ministry-funded stay at the University of Vienna (Austria). University of Malaga, Spain[email protected]ORCID:0000-0002-3519-0583Álvaro López-Martín. Research Sta in Training with a University Teacher Training Grant (FPU) awarded by the Ministry of Universities. Graduate in Journalism (2018) and Master’s Degree in Research on Media, Audiences and Professional Practice in Europe (2019) from the University of Malaga (UMA). He obtained a Collaboration and Initiation to Research grant in the Department of Journalism of the UMA’s Research Plan. He is the author of over 50 scientic papers, including articles and book chapters. He has also defended more than 70 papers at international conferences. He currently participates in a national R&D&I project and is a part of the GEPYC research group.University of Malaga, Spain[email protected]ORCID: 0000-0001-7871-2137

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]

[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]


20 | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | January-June of 2023Fake news and its perception among Young Spaniards: the inuence of socio-demographic factorsISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicación1. IntroductionSocial Media have replaced the traditional media’s role of providing news media globally (Newman et al., 2012; Nielsen & Schrøder, 2014; Bakshy et al., 2015; Gottfried & Shearer, 2017). In the case of Spain, the Digital News Report.es (Center for Internet Studies and Digital Life, 2022) shows that 23% of citizens prefer to access news content on social networks, to the detriment of the print press, radio or television. is rate reaches 47% for users aged 18 to 24, while those over 65 only access news content via social media in 9% of cases.Young people rely the most heavily on networks for information (Marchi, 2012; Sveningsson, 2015; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Mihailidis & Viotty, 2017; Paskin, 2018) and access traditional media increasingly less (Vihalemm & Kõuts-Klemm, 2017; Bärtl, 2018). Access to mainstream news media content, especially among adolescents, is declining rapidly (Zhu & Procter, 2015; urman & Fletcher, 2017). Social media has become a substitute for television (Cunningham & Craig, 2017; Himma-Kadakas et al., 2018). e root of networks’ mass appeal is due to young people’s widespread feeling that the media do not address issues that are important to them (Férdeline, 2021), which Casero-Ripollés (2012) and Yuste (2015) already noted a decade ago. ese authors also identied that Millenials profoundly disagreed with how they are reected in the press.For over ve years, fake news has simultaneously become a global phenomenon that has signicantly impacted the world’s information ows. Given that its primary means of dissemination are social networks (Blanco et al., 2021), it is likely that young Abstract: Over the last ve years, fake news has become a global phenomenon impacting global information ows. It is reasonable to think that young people are exposed to fake news the most, given that it is mainly disseminated through social media, and they are the main users of these applications. is study analyses young people’s perception of fake news based on a representative sample of residents in Spain aged between 15 and 24 (n=1,068). We consider the frequency they receive fake news, the topics they refer to, the sources, and how they deal with them. We considered how socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, location, political ideology or educational level inuence how they receive fake news. Among other ndings, the results show that the higher the age and educational level, the higher the rates of verication and recognition of fake news. In addition, individuals living in large municipalities and those on the right of the ideological spectrum verify information less frequently and use less reliable sources than other young people.Keywords:Young people; Spain; fake news; social media; ideology.Resumen: Desde hace algo más de un lustro, las fake news se han convertido en un fenómeno global que incide de modo determinante en los ujos comu-nicativos mundiales. Dado que el canal prioritario a través del cual se difunden son las redes sociales, cabe pensar que los jóvenes, principales usuarios de estas aplicaciones, constituyen el colectivo más expuesto a ellas. En este trabajo se analiza, partiendo de un muestreo representativo de los individuos residentes en España de entre 15 y 24 años (n=1.068), la percepción que los jóvenes tienen de las fake news, atendiendo a la fre-cuencia con que las reciben, sus temáticas y fuentes más habituales y el modo en que se enfrentan a ellas, teniendo en cuenta cómo inuyen en su recepción factores sociodemográcos como el sexo, la edad, el hábitat, la ideología o el nivel formativo. Entre otras constataciones, los resultados evidencian que cuanto mayor es la edad y el nivel formativo, mayores son las tasas de reconocimiento y vericación de noticias falsas; que es más habitual contrastar las informaciones entre los individuos que viven en grandes municipios; y que quienes se sitúan a la derecha del espectro ideo-lógico verican con menor frecuencia que el resto de jóvenes. Palabras clave: Jóvenes; España; fake news; redes sociales; ideología.Received: 22/07/2022 - Accepted: 09/12/22 - Early access: 13/12/2022 - Published: 01/01/2023Recibido: 22/07/2022 - Aceptado: 09/12/2022 - En edición: 13/12/2022 - Publicado: 01/01/2023
doxa.comunicación | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | January-June of 2023Bernardo Gómez-Calderón, Alba Córdoba-Cabús and Álvaro López-MartínISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-397821people are the group most exposed to it (Children’s Commissioner, 2017; Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Smith & Anderson, 2018), and consequently, they may be adversely aected in the medium and long term. In this paper, we analyse young Spanish people’s perception of fake news; we focus on how they deal with it and how sociodemographic factors such as gender, age, location, political ideology or educational level inuence how they receive it.1.1. Fake news, a phenomenon on the rise in the world news ecosystemFake news is a widespread information dysfunction that sometimes decisively aects public opinion and collective decision-making. Just over ve years ago, the phenomenon began to gain media coverage (Zimdars & McLeod, 2020; Baptista et al., 2021). Competition between fake news has been demonstrated in political processes such as the 2016 Brexit referendum (Bastos & Mercea, 2017; Grice, 2017; Blanco-Alfonso, 2020), the U.S presidential elections won by Republican front-runner Donald Trump (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Bakir & McStay, 2018; Bovet & Makse, 2019; Magallón, 2019a), the Catalonian referendum 1-0 in 2017 (Alandete, 2019), the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections won by Bolsonaro (Oliveira & Rossi, 2018) or the two 2019 general elections in Spain (Magallón, 2019b), among other relevant events.Since 2016, the eects of fake news have also been demonstrated in areas such as education, economics, science and especially medicine, in this case, in the wake of the global health crisis- the coronavirus pandemic SARS-Cov-2- (Brennen et al., 2020; Masip et al., 2020; Paniagua et al., 2020; Sánchez-García, 2021; Franceschi & Pareschi, 2022; Ho, Goh & Leun, 2022).In the scientic literature, there is still a disparity in criteria as to the limits of the phenomenon (Kapantai et al., 2020; Baptista & Gradim, 2022; García-Marín & Salvat-Martinrey, 2022): according to Tandoc et al. (2021: 111), the term is “complex and somewhat controversial due to the wide variety of ways it is used”. Although there is no consensus on its denition, we understand fake news as those messages produced by the media that are created and disseminated to cause harm, confuse and misrepresent (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Fake news usually relies on journalistic codes (Lazer et al., 2018; Canavilhas, Colussi & Moura, 2019; Blanco-Alfonso, 2020; Tandoc et al., 2019; Baptista et al., 2021; Tandoc et al., 2021) that make these messages plausible and dicult to detect, so they are often spread more quickly and disseminated widely than if they were truthful information (Vosoughi et al., 2018). is can be inferred from several studies that point out the multiplicity of channels through which fake news is disseminated simultaneously (Salaverría et al., 2020; López-Martín et al., 2021; Tandoc et al., 2021; Imaduwage et al., 2022; Raponi et al., 2022).e inuence of fake news can be powerful, as Bastick (2021: 1) points out; although the eects of misinformation are “small at the individual level”, the sum of these can be “enough to cause large-scale eects”. Szfgvb According to Allcot and Gentzkow (2017), there are two main reasons for producing fake news. On the one hand, fake news has economic gain since when it goes viral, it gains high advertising prots every time the parent websites are visited. On the other hand, ideologically speaking, fake news aims to discredit politicians or institutions that oppose the entity generating the message (Del Fresno-García, 2019). Gómez-Calderón et al. (2020) add a third reason, the strategic driver, as institutions or countries produce fake news to reinforce their position or weaken that of their opponents.
22 | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | January-June of 2023Fake news and its perception among Young Spaniards: the inuence of socio-demographic factorsISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicaciónFake news has become one of the research areas attracting the most attention among academics due to its overall strength and the serious challenges it poses (García-Galera, Blanco-Alfonso & Tejedor, 2019; García-Marín & Salvat-Martinrey, 2022). is is reected by the vast repertoire of papers focused on the typology of fake news, among others (García-Galera, Del-Hoyo-Hurtado & Blanco-Alfonso, 2020), the characterisation and analysis of fake news linked to case studies (Brennen et al., 2020; Salaverría et al., 2020; López-Martín et al., 2021), the dissemination of fraudulent news content (Vosoughi et al., 2018), cognitive biases when receiving fake news (Schwarz & Jalbert, 2021; Newman & Zhang, 2021; Van-der-Linden & Roozenbeek, 2021), options to neutralise its potential adverse eects (Bosworth, 2019; Fletcher et al., 2020; Vraga et al., 2020; García-Marín & Salvat-Martinrey, 2022) or the importance of verication platforms and collaborative journalism in mitigating the inux of misinformation (Magallón, 2018; Pérez-Curiel & Velasco, 2020; López-Martín & Córdoba-Cabús, 2021), among other aspects.It is dicult to categorically arm citizens’ capacity to identify fake news since it is primarily conditioned by their tendency to overestimate their ability to discern misleading content, known as the Dunning-Kruger eect (Gómez-Calderón et al., 2020). Age and political aliation seem to inuence how fake news is interpreted and reactions to it: thus, according to Guess et al. (2019), users identifying as conservatives or extreme right-wing and those over 65 are more likely to share this type of content on their social networks (Guess et al., 2019).According to the “Eurobarometer Standard 96. Public Opinion in the European Union” (European Commission, 2022), while 70% of E.U. inhabitants claim to nd false information on the Internet frequently, only 62% feel prepared to detect it (the gures are even less encouraging in Spain, 81% and 54%, respectively). erefore, we are facing a large-scale collective challenge, which can only be addressed through sustained media literacy work, the best tool for training citizens to be critical of media messages (Caldeiro & Aguaded, 2015). In this sense, the national and international secondary and university education initiatives are timely (cf. Auberry, 2018; Musgrove et al., 2018; Ranieri, 2018; Kaufman, 2019; Cebrián, 2019; y Valverde et al., 2022).1.2. Young people faced with fake newsSocial networks are a natural channel for young people to socialise and learn about their environment, making them privileged agents –albeit unwittingly– in spreading fake news. As Incibe (2019) highlights, they do not hesitate to share content if it grabs their attention, sometimes extensively, without assessing whether the information is reliable or even knowing it is not. Fake news is highly persuasive for young people. Wineburg et al. (2016) conducted interviews with Stanford undergraduates and concluded that most trust fake sources and content more than mainstream media news. According to several authors (Hargittai et al., 2010; Wineburg & McGrew, 2016; McGrew et al., 2017; McGrew et al., 2018), although young people are digital natives, it does not guarantee that they can identify fake news and several experiments conrm this. Leeder (2019) worked with a sample of students between 19 and 24 who had to identify fake news among a set of online texts that included true news items. is work demonstrated how dicult it is to detect them, as the rate of incorrect answers was 40%. According to this author, fake news can be identied depending on the time taken to evaluate them, analyse the websites or accounts where they appear, and contrast information with an alternative source, which users do not usually do.
doxa.comunicación | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | January-June of 2023Bernardo Gómez-Calderón, Alba Córdoba-Cabús and Álvaro López-MartínISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-397823Over the last ve years, young people’s perception of fake news has been extensively analysed. In many cases, studies have worked with biased samples made up exclusively of university students, who are considered more prepared to identify and dismiss hoaxes. In fact, on average, García, Sanjuán and Maza (2021) estimate that 53.9% of university students have a medium or high level of ability to detect fraudulent content. ere is a wide gap in compulsory education among students; according to credibility tests the group has undertaken, fake news is rarely doubted (cf. Leu et al., 2007; Loos et al., 2018; Pilgrim et al., 2019; Dumitru, 2020). In Spain, we generally work with sparsely representative convenience samples, so the proportion of fake news recognition varies. Martín-Herrera and Mocaletto (2021) nd that 73.7% of young people consider themselves somewhat prepared to detect this type of content, while Mendiguren et al. (2020) found that it was 80% (in both cases, the respondents are university students). Other equally recent studies (Pérez et al., 2021; Pérez et al., 2021; Pérez and Pedrero, 2021; De Vicente et al., 2021) nd signicantly lower rates of identifying fake news, between 57% and 59%.Young Spaniards’ sources for fake news are clear: mainly WhatsApp and Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter and Instagram, in other words, only social networks (cf. Pérez et al., 2021; Resende et al., 2019; Herrero et al., 2020; Mendiguren et al., 2020). Regarding the most frequent fake news topics, politics monopolised a large part of this content, although it alternated with paradoxical information and supposed news related to events, culture and health (Pérez & Pedrero, 2021; Tejedor et al., 2021)1.Some studies investigate the reasons young people detect fake news; among those are the social alarm they generate, the attractiveness of their headlines, the surprising nature of the content, their media source, or, often, the lack of logic in the story (De Vicente et al., 2021; Tejedor et al., 2021).Finally, once young people detect false content, they discard it, share it and verify it depending on the case. e latter behaviour is optimal but not as widespread as desirable. As far as we know, the use of fact-checking services is still incipient: in Spain, for example, 61.1% of young people are unaware of them, and the remainder have only used them once (Pérez & Pedrero, 2021). Also, in De Vicente et al. (2021), the rate of respondents who claim to check for possible fake news by default is less than 40%. In contrast, Catalina et al. (2017), Catalina et al. (2019), and Gómez-Calderón et al. (2020) nd that verifying dubiously credible news is almost as widespread as its reception (90% of incidences) among young users aged under 24. e disparity of the samples we work with explains the lack of agreement between some results and others, as in the case of the ability to detect fake news.2. Methode literature review was a starting point for this study; it was primarily designed to determine fake news’ impact on young Spaniards aged between 15 and 25, according to how they perceived it. Regarding the research subgoals, the authors set out to determine how often fake news is received on social networks and instant messaging applications (O1), identify the most common source (O2) and analyse young people’s reactions to this unreliable information, how often they use alternative 1 In other countries, alongside politics there are issues such as sport (caso de Portugal; cf. Figueira & Santos, 2019; Sobral & De Morais, 2020) or violence (Colombia: Carballo & Mallorquín, 2020).
24 | nº 36, pp. 19-42 | January-June of 2023Fake news and its perception among Young Spaniards: the inuence of socio-demographic factorsISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicaciónsources to contrast the information and the nature of the entities they use to verify the contents (O3). is was done by considering respondents’ sociodemographics to detect any signicant divergences in the records. Ultimately, the aim was to identify factors aecting young audiences’ perception of fraudulent information and reaction to establish eective deactivation strategies. e questionnaire technique was applied to achieve the proposed objectives, the Spanish population aged between 15 and 24 was taken as the universe, which is 4 831, 504 people on 1 January 2021 (INE, 2021). e starting point was a national sample proportional to the strata of the population under study. Estimating weighting coecients were applied since it was impossible to reach reasonable quotas for gender, age and province. e condence level was set at 95% with a limit of 1 066 surveyed (1,068 were obtained, 100.1% of the total), and the margin of error was +/3%.e weighting coecients were applied to the initial sample, which consisted of 52.2% women, and 47.8% men, with an average age of 21.8 (ME=22; DT=2,05), grouped into intervals between 15 and 19-year-olds (14.3%) and between 20 and 24 (85,7%). Most had completed secondary education, corresponding to higher levels of ESO (ird and Fourth year in the Spanish education system). Baccalaureate or Higher Vocational Training (50.2%). Table 1 shows the sample distribution according to gender, educational level and autonomous community. Table 1. Distribution of the sampleLevel of educationTotalMenWomenNo studies20.7%1.0%0,5%First Grade 0.7%0.6%0,7%Second Grade. 1st cycle 3.5%4.5%2,5%Second Grade. 2nd cycle 50.2%51.5%49,0%ird Grade. 1st cycle 12.6%15.3%10,2%ird Grade. 2nd cycle23.9%20.9%26,6%ird Grade (Master)