(Fake) news-finds-me: Interactive social and mobile media uses and incidental news reliance as antecedents of fake news-sharing

Abstract

Fake news is a well-recognized problem across most social media platforms and is especially pronounced in far-right networks. This study helps explain fake news-sharing among the far-right with a longitudinal survey of individuals who identify strongly with “Alt-Right” views in the U.S. We assembled theoretical insights on fake news-sharing and social media use for news to hypothesize that reliance on incidental news, in the form of the “news-finds-me” perception, directly increases fake news-sharing, which was supported. We further tested hypotheses about the main and interactive effects of theoretically-informed social and mobile media uses on the news-finds-me perception (directly) and fake news-sharing (indirectly), for a more nuanced understanding of the antecedents. Little is known about how uses of individual social media platforms and different uses of mobile phones are related and interact to shape users’ experiences with incidental news and subsequent sharing behaviors. Our findings demonstrate why it is important to consider how uses of social and mobile media function both independently and interactively to shape how people encounter news. For example, the interaction between Facebook use and mobile phone use for news increased the NFM perception directly and fake news-sharing indirectly, while Facebook use interacted with mobile phone use for political information to yield negative direct and indirect effects. While this integrated approach to studying social and mobile media represents a contribution for scholarship on the NFM perception, we recognize the distinctive characteristics of our sample and also interpret the findings through that lens.