Look at the Sender, Ignore the Information: Authenticity and Opinion Leaders in Spreading Fake Information to Teenagers

Abstract

This massive flow of information on social media has strongly affected authenticity which has become a crucial problem in the last couple of years among social media users. Due to excessive exposure to modern technology and recent political instability affecting all the fields and the whole population of the country, teenagers are also actively participating in posting and sharing political content on social media. Teenage social media users not only get political information from public pages, groups, and accounts, but they also receive information from their friends, family members, and opinion leaders such as social media influencers, political figures, journalists, teachers, and their elders in the family in the form of their Facebook posts, tweets, and WhatsApp messages. It is observed that this two-step flow of information in which the information is flowing from a comparatively influential person to the less influential teenage social media user is limited, directly or indirectly impacting trust and authenticity. The results of a Quantitative survey of teenage (N = 200) social media users showed that teenagers are mostly not very interested in political information but they take interest when it is shared by opinion leaders. The positive correlation between political information shared by opinion leaders and sharing without verification shows that teenagers don’t take an interest in verification if they get information from their opinion leaders.