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1. Introduction
The Macquarie Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary designated “fake news” and “post-truth”, respectively, as the words of the year in 2016 (Shu et al., 2017). In 2017, both the American Dialect Society and Collins Dictionary named “fake news” the word of the year.
Donald Trump's narrow victory in the 2016 United States (US) presidential election and the United Kingdom (UK)'s vote to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) have attracted great attention to the political influence of fake news. Apart from the political context, fake news has been found to promulgate information in other vital areas (Domenico et al., 2021b; Lazer et al., 2018). For example, in April 2013, a fake tweet was posted by a hacked Associated Press account, stating that the White House had been hit by two explosions and Barack Obama was injured. It caused the S&P 500 Index to decline by 0.9%, which was enough to destroy US$ 130 billion in stock value in a matter of seconds (Boididou et al., 2018b).
Fake news had long been embedded in history before the internet media entered the public lexicon (Al-Rawi, 2019a). It first appeared in the 19th century and evolved from its satirical literary origins into a passionately criticised Internet phenomenon (Bakir and McStay, 2018). Presently, fake news causes controversies among the public, scholars and politicians, especially owing to the widespread use of Internet media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
The influential combination of fake news and the internet media has attracted significant concern and attention in academic research Chen et al. (2015). In recent years, many articles on fake news have appeared in conferences and journal publications, including several top-tier journals, such as Science (Bakshy et al., 2015; Grinberg et al., 2019; Lazer et al., 2018; Vosoughi et al., 2018), Nature (Kucharski, 2016; Spinney, 2017; Williamson, 2016), MIS Quarterly (Kim and Dennis, 2019; Moravec et al., 2019) and Information Systems Research (Clarke et al., 2021). Additionally, there has been a trend towards dedicating fake news as a core research topic for certain special issues of international journals, such as the Journal of Management Information Systems and Information Processing and Management.
Although publications have gradually increased in recent years,...