Fake news is an emerging field of research that attracts much attention from
academic communities as well as mass media practitioners. However, the concept of
fake news is still ambiguous, and the boundary between the definition of fake news and
other relative concepts, such as news satire, yellow journalism, junk news, pseudo
news, hoax news, propaganda news, advertorial, false information, fake information,
misinformation, disinformation, mal-information, alternative fact, and post-truth is
blurred. The present study aims to identify the meanings of fake news and other related
concepts, and explore the recent trend of research on them. By searching the journals
listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index
Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database, the present study found 387 articles on fake news.
Through analyzing these articles, the present study maps the trend and reveals the highly
influential research articles, as well as theories and concepts that are used. The results
may provide fundamental insights into the development of research on fake news in
recent years.
Fake news, widely disseminated in cyberspace nowadays, is an emerging research
field that attracts the attention of a group of scholars from different fields. Several terms
are used interchangeably, for example, fake news, news satire, yellow journalism, junk
news, pseudo-news, hoax news, propaganda news, advertorial, false information, fake
information, misinformation, disinformation, mal-information, and alternative fact. The
above-mentioned terms can be divided into two categories: terms with similar meaning
to fake news and terms with similar meaning to false information. Essentially, fake news
discusses the news that is put out by news media. False information discussed
information that is distributed over the cyberspace. False information can be spread
alone or included in fake news to be delivered. Thus, false information and its related
terms have a larger range of scope compared with fake news. In this section, the paper
firstly introduces fake news and its related terms. Then, the paper introduces false
information and its related terms.
Fake news does not always report non-existent news stories. It rarely happens that
the whole news story is fabricated, although pure fabrication is still a possible source of
false information.
In general, fake news refers to news messages that contain wrong or false
information but do not report the incorrectness of information. However, not all papers
adopt this definition of fake news. Some researchers, such as Allcott and Gentzkow
(2017) defined fake news as news that is intentionally written to mislead the readers but
can be verified to be false. This kind of definition in turn raises the issue that who has
the authority and the ability to decide if the news is intentionally written to mislead the
audience. If a news report claims that the news does not purposely include the incorrect
facts, should the news with the incorrect fact be deemed fake news or not? The core
concept is that fake news is news with incorrect facts, whereas motivation is an
accompanying issue when discussing fake news. Not all incorrect facts are spread
purposely; some are distributed unintentionally, though. Researchers have to decide by
themselves if they consider the news that mistakenly includes incorrect facts as fake
news.
There exist multiple meanings of fake news that need to be clarified. On the other
hand, there are some terms with similar meanings to fake news. Junk news, pseudo
news, alternative fact, hoax news are terms with similar meaning to fake news. In this
case, fake news refers to inaccurate facts distributed in cyberspace in the sense that the
inaccurate facts are spread online rather than in the format of news reports. These
inaccurate or incorrect messages are named as disinformation, misinformation, mal
information, and rumors that are related to fake news.
News satire, yellow journalism, junk news, pseudo-news, hoax news, propaganda
news, advertorial are terms with similar meaning to fake news. Some people may
consider these terms as synonyms for fake news. For example, some people may
consider news satire as fake news since news satire is not real news. Some may believe
yellow journalism is a type of fake news because it is the use of sensational headlines,
rather than factual news, to capture a reader’s attention. Some may consider fake news
as junk news since fake news is also meaningless like trash but disseminated in bulk.
Some may consider fake news as pseudo-news that reports a non-existent story.
Nevertheless, there are still some differences among these terms.
The paper provides simplified definitions of the term “fake news” and related
concepts (shown in Table 1) and discusses these terms as below. Rather than setting the
boundary between each term, the present study focuses more on claiming that different
studies may have different ranges of research scope of fake news.
