AUTHORS: Csilla Czeglédi, Klára Veresné Valentinyi, Eszter Borsos, Éva Járási, Zoltán Szira, Erika Varga

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ABSTRACT: Over the last few decades social media and networking have become popular with the young, middle aged and elderly alike. However, it is the young who tend to be connected to social media most. They use social media for several purposes of which social networking, news dissemination as well as news consumption seem to be the leading cause. As a consequence, users are allowed to share emotions, opinions, bias and manipulative information sometimes without any control, which may lead to the phenomenon of fake news. The objective of this study is to examine news consumption, attitudes and strategies to fake news among young social media users. It is hypothesised that young social media users do not trust fully in social media, especially women. However, they have strategies to cope with fake news. It is also assumed that young social media users support the introduction of social media as a subject into the school curricula. All of our hypotheses were supported by the findings of qualitative research (focus group) and quantitative research (questionnaire). It was concluded that although news consumers do not trust in social media, they have specific techniques to distinguish false news from real news. The respondents expressed their opinion according to which strategies that deal with social media news should be taught in school.

KEYWORDS: social media, social networking, fake news, news consumption strategies, focus group research, Chi-squared test, Mann-Whitney test, communication

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