“Jag skiter i att det är fejk, det är förjävligt ändå”. Unga svenskars uppfattning om eller hur fake news påverkar deras och andras politiska ståndpunkter

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to examine if or how politically active Swedish youths, 20-30 years, perceive that fake news affects their and others political positions. Fake news is a phenomenon that has grown remarkably in the last few years. In short, it can be described as false and misleading information presented as true information, often with a political or economical purpose. The growing use of social media has created a possibility for people to spread fake news at a growing rate than ever before. Fake news has made its way into the public debate since Donald Trump used it frequently in the presidential election in 2016 to discredit his opponents. One theory that has researched the impact of media effects and more specifically what people think of this impact is called the Third person effect. The theory explains that people think that other people are more vulnerable to the impact of media than they are themselves. To broaden the knowledge about how people perceive that fake news affects them can give us an insight into whether fake news is something the Swedish population should be cautious about. This study is completed with six qualitative interviews, and one preparing survey that was sent out before the interviews. The study aims to answer three main questions about how people perceive that fake news affects their political views. These questions are “What does the respondents news consumption look like and what is their perception about what fake news is?”, “How do the respondents perceive that fake news affect their political views?” and “How do the respondents perceive that fake news affect other individuals in society?”. With these questions we will be able to answer the aim of the study, which is to examine if or how young Swedish people perceive that fake news affect their political views. The results show that all respondents had knowledge about fake news and were worried about how fake news could be used for the wrong purposes. The confidence about being able to determine which news are true and false was high among the left wing respondents. All respondents think that the reason for fake news being a big phenomenon today is because it is more favorable to spread fake news with strong opinions to attract people and form opinions. The results also found that the majority of the respondents often have more trust for information that is shared by opinion formers that share the same political views as the respondents. When it comes to fake news impact the respondents believe that they are being affected by both true news and fake news, but they believe that there are other specific groups that are more vulnerable for this impact. Whether fake news has an impact on the respondents political views is something that they partly agree with. They think that 4 they are being affected in the form of them being more skeptical of social media, but not affected in a way that completely changes their political views. When it comes to the perception of the impact on other groups the respondents do believe that others get affected to the point of changing political views. One of the most eminent results of this study was that the left wing respondents thought that there is a more organized structure in creating and spreading fake news on the extreme right wing, and that it could be big opinion formers that spread fake news, in comparison to the extreme left wing. Based on our study we draw the conclusion that there is a broad knowledge about how news affects you but that the impact of fake news is bigger on others than the individual itself. This study also showed that young politically educated individuals have knowledge about their media use and tend to use media based on their needs. There is also a broad knowledge about fake news and how this can affect other groups.