IS IT FAKE? I'LL GOOGLE IT. FAKE NEWS AND HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS IN PORTUGAL

The new media ecology that has emerged after the death of the mass media era is characterized by complex communication flows and an exponential increase of producers. Nowadays, there is a permanent connectivity, mobile platforms are everywhere, and everybody shares information. There is a sense of information overdose, ideological polarization and people distrust the news media and politics. We can say that these were the right ingredients for a perfect disinformation storm. Hence, despite being a really old problem, fake news recently became a major concern in the internet era. Young people are at the core of this new context. After a widespread investment in Media and Information Literacy during the last decade, recent research has given signs that young people may not be prepared to deal with this kind of disinformation. In this study quantitative methods are used to analyze how 602 higher education students from Portugal perceive fake news and how they behave when interacting with false information. Our main findings show that these youngsters and young adults see themselves as proactive but have some misconceptions about fake news.