Students’ awareness on the subject of ”fake news” and the reliability of media information

The article presents the result of the study conducted in February and March 2019 on the group of students of the newly opened field of study, Architecture of Information Spaces at the Department of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw. Various methods of gathering data and analysis were used, including desk research, survey, as well as eye-tracking and facetracking tests. In the article, I describe the first part of the results, i.e. how students assess the reliability of media information, what is their knowledge of information manipulation, and what techniques they use to check the credibility of the news. The survey was conducted on the available sample (28 respondents). The main findings are that students’ assessment of the credibility of media information is ambivalent, their knowledge about the problem of fake news is rather shallow and verification mechanisms based on the analysis of the source and form of the articles are unreliable with very simple manipulation.