Abstract

Fake news on social media undermines democracies and civil society. To date the research response has been message centric and reactive. This does not address the problem of fake news contaminating social media populations with disinformation, nor address the fake news producers and disseminators who are predominantly human social media users. Our research proposes three preventative interventions - two that empower social media users and one social media structural change to reduce the spread of fake news. Specifically, we investigate how i) psychological inoculation; ii) digital media literacy and iii) Transaction Cost Economy safeguarding through reputation ranking could elicit greater cognitive elaboration from social media users. Our research provides digital scalable preventative interventions to empower social media users with the aim to reduce the population size exposed to fake news.

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