Audiences’ acts of authentication in the age of fake news: A conceptual framework

Through an analysis of relevant literature and open-ended survey responses from 2501 Singaporeans, this article proposes a conceptual framework to understand how individuals authenticate the information they encounter on social media. In broad strokes, we find that individuals rely on both their own judgment of the source and the message, and when this does not adequately provide a definitive answer, they turn to external resources to authenticate news items.