In the new information ecosystem, fake news has become a keyword used to describe the term disinformation, especially in the digital environment. The digital world is becoming an increasingly important reality, as a result of the emergence and proliferation of social platforms. They have an important role because through them, fake materials are propagated, being shared and reshared by the public, taken ad literam and unverified, often creating feelings of panic and revolt. Although the debate on this phenomenon has become multidisciplinary (a topical subject for researchers in different fields, such as anthropologists, sociologists or political scientists), the current literature does not exhaust the complexity regarding the fake news issues. In this context, questions such as: “What are the most important effects of fake news”, “How can we efficiently combat fake news phenomenon?” remain open and require further clarification.
Thus, these questions can be seen as a starting point for the present paper whose purpose is to analyze current trends regarding ways to combat the phenomenon. The first section, will briefly present the most common theoretical directions in the current research on fake news. Then, it will highlight the various competing claims regarding the effects of fake news, focusing on the most recent findings in the literature that discuss about communicational pathologies in the online sphere. The last part of the paper will approache the way people process and deal with the information they encounter, regardless of whether that information is true or false.
This endeavor is premised on the belief that only by providing a deeper understanding of the fake news phenomenon we will be able to find relevant solutions for shaping the public policies into helping people to distinguish between true, documented news and news that presents false facts or events taken out of context, or presented in an angle that generates a totally or at least partially false image of reality.
Key words: fake news, veracity assessment, social media, sharing behavior