Social Media Literacy in Crisis Context: Fake News Consumption during COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

Roughly, Social Media Literacy (SML) can be defined as a particular set of practical, intellectual and emotional abilities required for social media users in order to create contents or to detect fake news posts (Robin Mansell, 2015). Thus, this research goes beyond the understanding of SML in a context of pandemic crisis to explore the use of social media by confined people during the COVID-19 outbreak. Actually, the exponential and gradual evolution of fake news and its extensive swindle to democracy, informational reliability and the public’s media trustworthiness has increased the necessity for undertaking academic researches about fake news (Zhou and Zafarani, 2018). In this perspective, this study focuses on a corpus of 186 people (essentially youth) acceded via online survey process, helping to collect data from very active social media contents consumers. Besides of the online questionnaire, remote interviews have been realised with digital professionals in order to get their experiences, knowledge and opinions about the research topic. Consequently, while attempting to comprehend the degree of proliferation of fake news in a context of epidemic crisis, this research investigates meanwhile people’s social media dependence during their confinements. In point of fact, in a context of global crisis socioemotional and psychological factors play a significant starring role in the propagation of fake news; facilitating de facto its considerable spread via social media platforms. For instance, the study proves that stressful quarantined people adopt irrational spontaneous reactions in sharing false information without paying much attention about their accuracy. Therefore, through a theoretical framework, a conceptual and analytical approach, combined with a scientific methodological enquiry and a rigorous investigation, this study attains to demonstrate people’s degree of fake news consumption via social media platforms, their level of social media appropriation, their principal motivations for social media use during Coronavirus lockdown.