Abstract:

Information comes as basic good which affects social well-being. A modern society and a modern state – its administration, education, culture, national economy and armed forces – cannot function efficiently without a rationally developed field of information. The quality of the functioning of that system depends on a specific feature of information, that is namely: its reliability which makes it possible for us to evaluate accuracy, completeness, valence and trust towards information. A part of information conveyed in social media is fake news that is namely: distorted signals not correlated with the truth, which may mislead their recipients. Such information comes as an element of info-environment defined by the term of post-truth. The main aim of the article is identification of the attitudes towards the processes of identification and verification of fake news in the environment of digital media. The subject of the research refers to the users’ attitudes towards fake news. As indicated by the research, the attitudes towards fake news are not unambiguous. About 2/3 of the respondents claim that they are not able to distinguish fake news from true information; only every twelfth respondent declares that they know tools for verification of information, although the research survey has been carried out among students of media management, journalism and marketing – students who deal with information in social media.