Examining fake news comments on Facebook: an application of situational theory of problem solving in content analysis

Abstract

Fake news is always diffused faster than true news, particularly on social media such as Facebook where everyone can freely share and comment on posts. This study aimed to identify fake news commenters’ belief and emotion towards fake news on Facebook, analyze their situational perceptions and communicative action towards fake news based on Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STOPS), and examine the association between the variables. A content analysis was conducted on 2189 comments derived from 45 fake news on Facebook between 2017 to 2019, Chi-Square Test was subsequently performed to analyze the association between the variables. The findings showed that there is an association between belief and emotion towards fake news - fake news non-believers tend to show negative emotion when they read fake news and commenters with negative emotion are more likely to claim that the news is fake compared to their counterpart. However, negative emotion is not significantly associated with proving the news is fake. Among the situational perceptions of STOPS that were significantly associated with communicative action, constraint recognition appeared to have the largest effect. The findings of this study provided recommendation to the collective efforts of multistakeholders in combating fake news.