How Is Fake News Spread? An Analysis of the Dissemination Process: Actors, Channels, and Motives

Even though fake news is widely recognized as one of the most serious threats in the post-truth era, there are still some gaps regarding fake news dissemination. To address these gaps, it is necessary to conduct theoretical research revising and analyzing the latest scientific developments on this topic paying attention to social, psychological, and technological contexts in which fake news is constructed and spread. Understanding this process might help to improve the media literacy of users by raising awareness and forming critical attitudes to by-products of the information environment. This article presents a literature review on fake news dissemination based on an analysis of 106 papers extracted from the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. The author focuses on identifying the main actors who spread fake news. Additionally, a typology is proposed to organize knowledge about the motives behind creating fake news, based on social, psychological, and cognitive factors.