Spreading Fake Content via Social Media among Tertiary Level Students in Rangpur, Bangladesh

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the reasons behind spreading fake content through SMP and whether tertiary-level students can identify fake content. The study used a descriptive research design. A simple random sampling technique was used for selecting the sample, and a structured questionnaire used for collecting data where the sample size was 121. The respondents were both male (78) and female (43). The ages of the participants were from 18 to 25. The use rate of SM was 100%, whereas Facebook is the most popular SMP (71.9%). More than 80% of participants use SMPs (Newspaper FB page, Journalists SMP wall, various pages and groups) as their information source. About 92.7% of respondents believe that fake content like news, misinformation, and disinformation spread via social media. Most of these are spread by Facebook (72.7%). Among various reasons, 68 (56.2%) respondents said that the most crucial reason is to endanger opposite political parties. The majority of the respondents said that they could identify fake content. They mention that if the content is news to check whether the news is fake or not, they usually look at the things like a search sources, checking photo and video clips, checking publisher’s websites, noticing published dates, visiting prominent news sites, notice spelling, and language, checking reporters identity, check lascivious words, search disclaimer, search URL, read the headline several times, and use media literacy knowledge. Of the respondents, who join the survey, 50.4% don’t have any idea about fake content identifying tools (Google Advance Search, Reverse Image Search, Tin Eye, Yandex, Bing, Photo Forensics, InVID), and the rest of them(49.6%) know about this tools. More than half of the respondents do not use these tools to identify fake content on social media.