Fake Or Not Fake, That Is The Question: Disinformation Recognition Among University Students

The authenticity of the information has become a topic of great social repercussion. In the digital environment, the scope and effects of the dissemination of distorted, inaccurate or false information acquire enormous potential due to the impact they have in the real world, in minutes, for millions of citizens. This research has investigated the following questions: Are university students capable of discerning the veracity of the information that reaches them? How and to what extent are information consumption habits related to the previous question? Do they know instruments such as fact-checkers to identify fake news, or do they build their own contrast strategies? The level of trust generated by the different sources of information, from local and regional media to large media, as well as social networks, has also been studied, with the aim of analyzing how the crisis of trust in the media it is translated into information consumption habits and how they position themselves in the complex media ecosystem. The work is based on the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample (n=830) of students from the University of the Balearic Islands. The results of the study show, on the one hand, the deficits that university students present when it comes to recognizing false news, secondly, they show very little use of tools to contrast the veracity of the information and, finally, they allow outline the relationship between different types of information consumption and the ability to recognize fake news.