Special Issue “Fighting Fake News: A Generational Approach"

Abstract

To reach a state of equal opportunity in our society, access to credible, accessible information [1,2] across all generations is of the utmost importance. Access to (digital) information about services and products is crucial [3]. Van den Hoven [4], referring to Rawls [5,6], goes so far as to refer to accessible information as a “primary good”. As all citizens have an equal right to information, Bovens [7], Bovens and Loos[8] even advocate granting citizens’ information rights, following along the lines of the classic (freedom) rights. We define fake news as “any kind of misleading information that could mistakenly be considered accurate, regardless of the mechanisms that led to its propagation” [9]. See [10] for a typology of scholarly definitions and [11] for a discussion of related terms, such as mis-, dis- and mal-information. Fake news endangers the accessibility of information for younger and older citizens [12–14]. The question we are confronted with now is how to fight fake news so that all generations can continue to have access to credible, accessible information. It is not only important to investigate the feasibility of interventions at an early age to empower young citizens such that they are able to establish the trustworthiness of news. It is also essential to involve other generations as due to the paucity of studies in this field, it would be naive to assume that they are not vulnerable to fake news” [9]. (…) This Special Issue of Societies comprises seven papers that present empirical research in Bosnia and Herzegiovina (1x) [19], one multiple-country study (Argentine, Australia, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, USA, Qatar, New Zealand and Costa Rica) [20], the USA (3×) [21–23], Romania (2×) [24,25], focusing on how different generations perceive fake news, including young and middle-aged groups of people [19], multiple age groups [22,25], university students and adults in general [20], elementary students (grades 1–5 in USA [21], children and adolescents [24], and paying attention to age, education and gender [23]. The use of an ad hoc analysis sheet, validated by the interjudge method [20], could represent an interesting approach to investigate how people in different professions discern reliable information from fake news, whereas descriptive observational data [21] might provide insights into how different age groups search for information and how often they are exposed to fake news. Some authors [19] used thematic analysis to investigate differences between generations in perceiving fake news; others [25] used surveys to describe the differences between generations in the perceived incidence of fake information. Study [23] used surveys to assess the impact of the characteristics of online articles and their authors, publishers and sponsors on perceived trustworthiness to ascertain how readers make online article trust decisions. In other studies [22,24], experiments were conducted to explore the rationale people use when deciding what information to trust. Overall, this Special Issue provides insights into the different methodologies available to research fake news from a generational perspective across different age groups.