Today's media society allows young people to come into contact with news through their everyday use of social media. News is interspersed between the friends' photos on the Instagram platform. But can everything be trusted? How do young people know what is true news and what is fake? The phenomenon of fake news refers to disinformation that is published with the aim of imitating true news articles. Thus the purpose of the study is to investigate how the use of social media has affected young Swedes' civic reasoning of news and what the consequences of fake news on Instagram may be. To investigate this, the demonstrations in Iran that started in September 2022, and which were ongoing during the study, were used as a starting point to understand how young people examine Instagram posts.The study has been carried out by compiling qualitative data, mainly from surveys, but also with quantitative data from five semi-structured interviews. The results provided an overall picture of young people's perception of fake news and an insight into what young Swedes' civic reasoning process looks like. The conclusion shows that fake news in connection with the demonstrations in Iran did not affect all young people equally. Some felt that the knowledge of fake news negatively affected their perception of the credibility of any news from the demonstrations. While others, due to the strong emotions the event evoked, saw past the problem of fake news, which affected their civic reasoning abilities. The conclusion also shows that young Swedes have a good idea of what fake news is and the motives behind the spread of fake news on Instagram. However, they feel that the credibility of true news generally decreases, as it is easy to spread fake news on Instagram. This, in turn, can lead to young people avoiding news and news accounts on Instagram to avoid questioning and reviewing news posts they see.In conclusion, young people possess civic reasoning abilities and review posts that they consider skeptical. However, these abilities vary and it is therefore important that they develop their source-critical process, above all as this is essential to be able to navigate among information online.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-60828 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Martin Tirado, Marie-Louise, Holmén, Ellen |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för teknik och samhälle (TS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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