Abstract
The study focused on issues relating to fake political news in social media and
youth participation in politics in South-East Nigeria. Specifically, it determined
youths’ frequency of use of social media to gather political news, their major
sources of political news online, extent to which they verify credibility and
authenticity of political news and their sources, their level of exposure to fake
political news online, and ways fake news in social media influence their
participation in politics. Survey research design was adopted. Population of study
was made up of undergraduate students (youths) in South-East state universities,
aged 18 to 29 years. Questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were
analysed using frequency, percentages and mean. Findings reveal that many
youths (56%) frequently use social media to gather political news especially from
family members, friends, special groups, influencers and opinion leaders’ pages
online. They however, rarely verify quality of such political news and their various
sources. The findings further reveal that youths have been exposed to fake political
news online and this has negatively affected their political engagements,
orientation, perception, interest and trust in elected government. In line with these,
the researcher recommends continual use of social media platforms to disseminate
verified, authentic and credible political news, introduction of compulsory course
on ‘how-to-spot-fake-news’ in the universities and development of updated fact
checking apps that can verify political news emanating from short tweets, hash
tags, posts, comments, unverified sources, and illogical stories.etc. There should
also be information websites created and handled by non-partisan persons where
youths can access correct political information.