DEEPFAKES, FAKE NEWS, AND DIGITAL TRUST: INSIGHTS FROM ROMANIAN SOCIAL MEDIA USERS
DEEPFAKES, FAKE NEWS, AND DIGITAL TRUST: INSIGHTS FROM ROMANIAN SOCIAL MEDIA USERS

Summary/Abstract: In today’s digital society, the spread of misinformation through false online content has become a major problem worldwide. Fake news, deceiving information presented as real, has the potential to manipulate public opinion, distort facts, and weaken trust in traditional and online media sources. With technological advances, a new form of misinformation has emerged known as deepfakes, which makes distinguishing between reality and fiction even more challenging. Deepfakes are a more complex form of digital manipulation, using artificial intelligence to generate apparently genuine but in fact completely fake audiovisual content. The present study analyses the impact of fake news and deepfakes on Romanian social media users by conducting a non-representative self-administered online survey (N=154). The results indicate that the effects of fake news and deepfakes are influenced by socio-demographic factors such as age, gender, and educational level. Young people, as well as Romanian social media users with a high level of education, are more familiar and aware of these phenomena and their negative effects, likely due to higher media literacy. The collected data also suggest that female users have a critical and cautious approach regarding the consumption of digital content, thereby reducing the impact of misinformation. Romanians also believe that repeated exposure to fake news and deepfakes leads to a loss of trust in social media. However, most users do not consider that being repeatedly confronted with fake news and deepfakes makes them necessarily more susceptible to manipulation.

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