Fake News Why Do We Believe It Pmc

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 5, 2025, 6:38 PM

Auteur correspondant. Service de rhumatologie, hôpital Saint-Antoine, Sorbonne université. AP–HP, 184, rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 75012 Paris, France. Accepted 2022 Feb 22; Issue date 2022 Jul. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website.

Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories,... These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. Fake news dissemination has increased greatly in recent years, with peaks during the US presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has addressed fake news creation, consumption, sharing, and detection as well as approaches to counteract it and prevent people from believing it. This update addresses only a part of the fake news-related issues and focuses on determinants leading individuals to believe fake news, noting that rheumatology is scarcely represented. Some determinants relate to the ecosystem of media and social networks, such as the availability and rapid spread of fake news, the unselected information on platforms and the fact that consumers can become creators...

Cognitive factors are important, such as confirmation bias, political partisanship, prior exposure and intuitive thinking. Low science knowledge and low educational level are also involved. Psychological factors include attraction to novelty, high emotional state, and the emotionally evocative content of fake news. High digital literacy protects against believing fake news. Sociological factors such as online communities, or echo chambers, and the role of pressure groups have been identified. The implication for practice can be deduced, including education in media literacy and warning tips, reliable journalism and fact-checking, social media regulation, partnership of media platforms’ with fact-checkers, warning messages on networks, and digital...

Health professionals need to better understand the factors that cause individuals to believe fake news. Identifying these determinants may help them in their counseling role when talking to patients about misinformation. Keywords: Fake news, Misinformation, Social networks, Cognitive bias Fake news have become a real threat to society. How do psychological and social factors influence whether we fall for them or not? And what can we do against it?

Whether it's the war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic or gender issues, more and more fake news has been circulating on the internet in recent years, especially on emotional and controversial topics. Sometimes, it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Other times, they are easier to recognize. But not for everyone: Some internet users are more likely to accept misinformation and fake news as true information than others. In this DW Fact check, we look at why that is. A term that comes up again and again in this context is "cognitive bias." It describes faulty tendencies in human thinking from which we find it difficult to free ourselves.

Among other things, our views and our preconceived worldview, also called "partisanship" or "confirmation bias" in some specialist articles, play a major role in why we fall for fake news. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Received 2021 Jan 6; Accepted 2021 Jun 10; Collection date 2021. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Proliferation of misinformation in digital news environments can harm society in a number of ways, but its dangers are most acute when citizens believe that false news is factually accurate. A recent wave of empirical research focuses on factors that explain why people fall for the so-called fake news.

In this scoping review, we summarize the results of experimental studies that test different predictors of individuals’ belief in misinformation. The review is based on a synthetic analysis of 26 scholarly articles. The authors developed and applied a search protocol to two academic databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The sample included experimental studies that test factors influencing users’ ability to recognize fake news, their likelihood to trust it or intention to engage with such content. Relying on scoping review methodology, the authors then collated and summarized the available evidence. Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information (misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and hoaxes) claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news.[1] Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a...

It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text.[1] Because of this diversity of types of false... The prevalence of fake news has increased with the recent rise of social media,[7] especially the Facebook News Feed, and this misinformation is gradually seeping into the mainstream media.[8] Several factors have been implicated... Fake news can reduce the impact of real news by competing with it. For example, a BuzzFeed News analysis found that the top fake news stories about the 2016 U.S.

presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than top stories from major media outlets.[13] It also particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage. The term has at times been used to cast doubt upon credible news, and U.S. president Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing the term by using it to describe any negative press coverage of himself. It has been increasingly criticized, due in part to Trump's misuse, with the British government deciding to avoid the term, as it is "poorly defined" and "conflates a variety of false information, from genuine... Multiple strategies for fighting fake news are actively researched, for various types of fake news. Politicians in certain autocratic and democratic countries have demanded effective self-regulation and legally enforced regulation in varying forms, of social media and web search engines.

On an individual scale, the ability to actively confront false narratives, as well as taking care when sharing information can reduce the prevalence of falsified information. However, it has been noted that this is vulnerable to the effects of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases that can seriously distort reasoning, particularly in dysfunctional and polarised societies. Inoculation theory has been proposed as a method to render individuals resistant to undesirable narratives. Because new misinformation emerges frequently, researchers have stated that one solution to address this is to inoculate the population against accepting fake news in general (a process termed prebunking), instead of continually debunking the... You have full access to this open access article Deepfakes is a term for content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) with the intention to be perceived as real.

Deepfakes have gained notoriety in their potential misuse in disinformation, propaganda, pornography, defamation, or financial fraud. Despite prominent discussions on the potential harms of deepfakes, empirical evidence on the harms of deepfakes on the human mind remains sparse, wide, and unstructured. This scoping review presents an overview of the research on how deepfakes can negatively affect human mind and behavior. Out of initially 1,143 papers, 28 were included in the scoping review. Several types of harm were identified: Concerns and worries, deception consequences (including false memories, attitude shifts, sharing intention, and false investment choices), mental health harm (including distress, anxiety, reduces self-efficacy, and sexual deepfake victimization),... We conclude that deepfake harm ranges widely and is often hypothetical; hence, empirical investigated of potential harms on human mind and behavior and further methodological refinement to validate current findings is warranted.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript. Digital content has long been prone to manipulation for various reasons such as advertisement, art, entertainment, as well as for nefarious motives such as deception, fraud, propaganda, and slander. Technological development accelerates the usability and quality of digital content creation and manipulation. Recent developments of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to easy to access tools which allow the generation of completely artificial digital media. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are AI models consisting of a generating component and an adversarial discriminator component whose interplay continually refines the model’s ability to generate the desired output (Creswell et al. 2018).

GAN-based models are able to produce synthetic content indistinguishable from real content, which has been colloquially known as “deepfake”, a portmanteau of deep (learning) and fake (Chadha et al. 2021; Lyu 2020; Westerlund 2019). Deepfakes are AI-generated content created to be recognized as real, and can appear as pictures, videos, text, or audio (Farid 2022; Khanjani et al. 2023). Along modalities, human ability to detect deepfakes is at chance level (Diel et al. 2024a).

Although deepfakes can hypothetically depict any type of content, they are renown and notorious for their use in the recreation of real humans. Using AI-based technologies such as face-swapping, deepfakes can be created by projecting one person’s face onto another in the target material (e.g., a video). While the initial use of deepfakes has often been humorous, severe misuse of deepfakes is found in pornography, political propaganda and disinformation, financial fraud and marketplace deception, and academic dishonesty (Albahar and Almalki 2019;... 2020; (Campbell, et al., 2022), Plangger, Sands, and Kietzmann 2021; Fink 2019; Hamed et al. 2023; Ibrahim et al. 2023).

Deepfakes first gained public awareness due to their use in the creation of AI-generated pornography of celebrities in 2017 as the first use of the term ‘deepfake’ occurred in this context (Fido et al. 2022; Popova 2020; Westerlund 2019). The vast majority of deepfakes on the internet are pornographic in nature (Ajder et al. 2019). Cases of revenge- or exortion-based deepfake pornography have been reported including targeting minors (FBI 2024; Mania 2024). In South Kora, which accounts for about 99% of deepfake pornography content (Home Security Heroes 2023), a recent legislation criminalized possession or consumption of deepfake pornography (Jung-joo 2025).

Similarly, the creation of deepfake pornography has been criminalized in the United Kingdom (Gov.uk 2025), the publication of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes has been prohibited by the United States’ Take It Down Act (US Congress... The use of a target person’s face for the creation of a sexual deepfake is typically done without their consent, which may lead to considerable harm to the person (Blanchard and Taddeo 2023). When used intentionally to damage a person or their reputation, sexual deepfakes can be considered a type of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA; McGlynn and Toparlak 2025; Rigotti et al. 2024). While conventional IBSA often involves the sharing of sexually explicit material of a target taken in a private real-life environment (e.g., sex footage), deepfakes enable the generation of sexual content involving situations the target... Consequences of such novel forms of IBSA have so far not been investigated thoroughly.

Nevertheless, such information is highly relevant for the estimation of personal harm and potential compensatory measures for victimization.

Fake News Why Do We Believe It Pmc

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