Seeking information with political content, fact checking and cynicism in the post-truth era

In the digital age we live in, information technologies are very advanced and many uncertainties have emerged related to citizenship, political information acquisition, political participation and the accuracy of the information obtained through technological means. With the help of new İnternet technologies, it has become ultimately easy to access information produced by others through the production and sharing of information in the political field, like in any other social areas. Although the fact that individuals as citizens have such an opportunity has been seen as a positive phenomenon for democracy, the fact that so much "right" and "wrong" information, which is very easy to access, exists simultaneously and sometimes side by side in the same medium, brings about the necessity to be careful about their truth and accuracy. In this study, how individuals behave in the context of "true and correct information", especially in relation to political knowledge, was examined. The focus of the research is on how individuals evaluate the actors of the political field, how they evaluate the information related to the political field obtained from the media, especially from the digital media, provided by web 2.0 technology, and how they take a position towards the accuracy of this information and how much they are eager to seek to find political information that may be an alternative to this information. For this purpose, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. While quantitative data collection method is preferred to reach generalizable information, qualitative method based on interpretive understanding which tries to explore social phenomena in contexts is used to help in-depth understanding of the subject. Within the scope of the quantitative research, the population of the study was limited to individuals aged 18 years and over in Aydın province, which is one of the provinces representing the Aegean Region at the second level (IBBS-2) by the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS). In determining the participants to be included in the study, some principles of stratified sampling and proportional sampling method were employed. For this purpose, participant strata were determined according to the population of the central and other districts of Aydın province, and attention was paid to the homogeneous distribution of the participants in terms of political belonging, age, gender and income group. For this purpose, a sample group of 723 people was reached and 703 questionnaires obtained were considered valid. Semi-structured in-depth interview technique was used as a data collection tool and 20 participants were interviewed within the scope of qualitative research which was designed from the point of view of understanding and interpretation of the research. For this purpose, maximum diversity sampling method was conducted in the selection of the interviewees within the framework of gender, age, income perception and political belonging criteria.