Investigating the Impact of Mood and Emotion on the Perception of Fake News on Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms have enabled producers of fake news to craft messages at an unprecedented rate and have rendered these messages accessible to the masses at no cost. Although the context of social media is ripe with affective attributes, research on fake news on social media has largely strayed away from understanding the impact of users’ emotion on their perception of fake news. We propose a NeuroIS approach to investigate the effect of experiencing specific moods and emotions on (a) users’ belief in fake news and (b) users’ intent to share misinformation in the context of users interacting with social media. This research-in-progress responds to calls for research on the mechanisms by which fake news become entrenched as well as mechanisms to quell the influence of fake news. It also contributes to the emerging literature on the role of emotion in the perception of fake news on social media platforms.