Effects of manipulative news in social media on the Z generation

With the new media that entered our lives in the mid-2000s, mass communication has moved to a different dimension, and studies have started to show that this new social space is as harmful as it is beneficial. This rapid change has brought the freedom of the audience and the readership to use many new media elements in terms of access to information without being dependent on a single source. The new media has opened the door to a new public space for everyone, with its participants and social groups exceeding millions, without political or geographical borders. While this new public sphere is the harbinger of an age in which mass communication is reduced to seconds, it brings along the questions of what the effects of a sharing that can be seen by millions of people with a single click. The deepening of the negative situations caused by fake news in today's societies makes it important to examine this field. In this sense, the thesis tries to make sense of the digital fetishism, which exists especially among generations and is getting deeper, as well as containing information that will shed light on this field.. The shares that users can create very simply and with little experience have become open to manipulation and have become a particularly need to be researched for the Z generation, the biggest source of information on social media. In this sense, the thesis mainly focuses on the reactions or unresponsiveness of the generation Z to fake contents, and analyzes the active and passive positions of the generation members against these contents. The study, which aims to reveal the effects of fake information in social media on the Z generation, focused on the impact and reception studies as the main backbone.