The attitudes of social media users toward fake news through coronavirus pandemic; evidence from Istanbul

The coronavirus, which outbroke in Wuhan, China in December 2020, and turned into an international pandemic, affected all countries drastically. In Turkey, the first case was confirmed on March 11, 2020, and the first death occurred one week later. As the medical containment of the coronavirus pandemic is under the responsibility of diligent healthcare professionals of each country, this master's thesis focuses on to what extend fake news have misled social media users through Covid-19 pandemic. Social media, which has many positive aspects, is also a medium where fake news can quickly spread. To quantitatively measure to what extend fake news have misled social media users in pandemic living in Istanbul, Turkey, a web questionnaire consisting of 16 news pieces (8 actual/8 fake news stories) was prepared. The fake news were selected from the database of the fact-checking organization teyit.org, which verifies claims from multiple reliable sources. In the web survey, attended by 390 people between March 31 and April 18, 2020, social media users responded whether they have remember the fake news and assess subjectively their information values ranging from completely accurate to completely false. According to the research findings, selected fake news in the coronavirus outbreak has misled, on average, a third (36%) of all users and a quarter (26%) of people remembering fake news. Fake news may mislead more users when it ably imitates actual news pieces. As the education level of newsreaders increases, the tendency to believe in fake news decreases. Also, the misleading effect of some fake news decreases within a few weeks. New researches could clarify this positive change, which may stem from the effort of the Ministry of Health, providing an accurate and rapid flow of information through press conferences or that of fact-checking websites like teyit.org to refute false claims.