An Empirical Study on Fake News Menace and Misinformation with Special Reference to India

Fake news are the news, cooked up stories or hoaxes that are created to deliberately misinform or deceive the consumers/readers. Usually, these stories are created to either influence people’s views, push a political agenda or cause confusion and it's a profitable business for online publishers in most cases. Fake news has been in existence from the beginning of the printing press but in the age of the internet and social media, it has found a tremendous application. Fighting against fake news menace is of importance concerning the platforms like Facebook, Google, the news media, the government and an informed citizenry. The objective of the study is to understand the Motivation behind the creation of fake news and it’s financial gain and to study the concept and nature of the creation of fake news. The independent variables are Age, gender, educational qualification and occupation. The dependent variables are Whether the motivation to create fake news include financial gain and agreeability towards that fake news is any information that is deliberately meant to be wholly or largely false or misleading. The Sample Size collected is 204 responses. The results observed from the analysis is that The respondents working in public sectors between the age of 37-60 years have agreed that the motivation behind the creation of fake news includes financial gain than the respondents between the age of 37-60 years who own businesses. Thus, the paper suggests that Quality in journalism is the solution to curb fake news and money's the motivation behind the creation of fake news, the journalists are also ought to have the responsibility of not creating fake news and media hoaxes just for the views instead must focus genuine news and earn people's belief. The author in this paper concludes that fake news menace is a global issue and has to be controlled and monitored by the government