Journal of Mass Communication & Journalism

The quandary of fake news continues to scare governments, media, journalists, nongovernmental organizations and audiences across the world. Various institutions and individuals have developed mechanisms to spot and counteract fake news that range from anti-fake news laws, social media policies, facts checking applications and reverse search technologies. However, fake news remains an enigma to the world of communication and information management [1]. One management strategy that has been overlooked over the years is media and information literacy as proposed by Grunwald Declaration on Media Education in 1982 by 19 nations during the UNESCO’s International Symposium on Media Education. This theoretical review paper focuses on the role of media literacy in managing fake news [2]. Since most of the fake news spotting and counteracting practices have focused on the place of journalists, media houses, governments and social media owners without definitive success, this study focuses on empowerment of the consumer of fake news though media literacy [3]. The review concludes that, if audiences of fake news are empowered through media literacy, then they can source, process, consume and archive information only after verification. This study recommends a paradigm shift from focusing all the attention on spotting and counteracting fake news from media, journalists, legal systems and social media owners to empowerment of news consumers though media literacy [4].

This paper analyses the new informative consumptions and uses of social media among university students in Colombia. From the analysis of various surveys carried out in 2018 and in 2019, Colombian university students will be able to study how the processes of news reading and the uses of social media have evolved. Since the arrival in our lives of social networks sites and the use of numerous hours of the cell phone with an Internet connection, reading habits and news consumption have changed considerably; to the press, to the radio and to the television, the mobility of the news is added through the newsfeed of Facebook and Twitter. With this research, it is desired to observe the evolution in the uses and informative consumptions from the use of social networks sites by means of the quantitative survey technique and a selected sample of university students in the city of Bogotá.