“My friend posted it and that’s good enough for me!”: Source Perception in Online Information Sharing

One of the solutions proposed to mitigate the impact of fake news is to train readers to be more critical of the material they encounter. While critical research and reading are indeed important skills to teach, the study of legends shows us that our acquisition of information—even that which we might call “news”—often comes from informal, conversational sources rather than from activities that we would label “research.” On social media, where the line between reading and conversing is especially blurred, the vetting of sources is complicated by the perception of exactly who or what the source of the information really is.