The October 17th revolution : evaluating motives and effects behind sharing fake news on social media

Abstract

In light of the influence of fake news on the Lebanese revolution that was ignited on the 17th of October 2019, this research paper examines how Notre Dame University (NDU) students reacted, assessed and were affected by false information. Four focus groups were conducted with 24 NDU students from different faculties and majors to gather valuable results. To answer this study’s five questions and look deeper into the youth’s behavior, comprehension, and evaluation of fake news spread on social media, the researcher adopted the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) developed by Katz in 1959. The findings revealed that although students felt bombarded by excessive news sharing on social media platform to the extent that chaos was created, they were mostly not deceived by information they read online. Results also showed that teens do not majorly rely on social media to get news. However, when reading anything shared on these platforms, they depend on certain features that help them assess accurately the correctness of each.