A study of modelling the antecedent factors of fake news sharing and the moderating effect of SNS dependency

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationships between behavioral factors and fake news sharing and explore the moderating effect of social networking sites (SNS) dependency on those relationships. For this, the study collected data from 352 social media users in South Korea through a survey method and used hierarchical multiple regression analyses. The results show that the more self-expression, social tie strength, or parasocial interaction participants perceive online, the more favorable fake news sharing they have. Conversely, status-seeking was not significantly associated with fake news sharing in this study. A positive relationship between self-expression and fake news sharing is stronger for participants with high rather than low SNS dependency. However, SNS dependency was found to have no significance on the relationship between other behavioral factors and fake news sharing. This study is believed to be the first to model the behavior of social media users in sharing fake news and authenticating it before sharing it online.

Keywords

• affordance theory
• social impact theory
• sns dependency theory
• fake news sharing