While scrolling through Twitter, Facebook or various other social media sites, one might not even notice it — and that’s largely the point. 
Recently, the emergence of “fake news” on social media has rapidly spread.  And there’s usually malicious intent behind most published “hoax” news articles.
As the definition of fake news has grown and expanded, it has become a vague term that can apply to many “news” articles that  are shared everyday. The New York Times described online fake news as fictitious articles created to deceive readers, with the general goal of receiving more web traffic.
Like many others, mass communication freshman Tristian Maddox said fake news is ever-present on his social media accounts. 
“On Facebook you see it all the time,” Maddox said. “It always is popping up. People are sharing it, believing it.”
During the 2016 election, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were in the headlines of many fake articles that circulated the internet, and their effects are still ongoing.
With the way social media operates, political science and Spanish senior Morgan Johnson said it’s easier for these articles to be shared with less thought being put into the actual content.
“It’s easier for people to create confirmation bias,” Johnson said. “I think Americans have gotten away from actually doing real life research.”
Regardless of party affiliation, fake news has an overall negative effect on the general public. European newsite The Local has called it a form of psychological warfare. 
Biochemistry sophomore Kennedy Beal said the spread of fake news can give people the wrong ideaabout current issues.
“It can give people a totally misconstrued version of what’s happening or what’s going on,” Beal said. “I think it allows people to live in a bubble of things that aren’t true, whether it be to the right or to the left. 
Recently, Facebook launched an initiative to cut back on the number of fake news stories popping up on people’s news feeds. According to the BBC, Facebook experts recently studied pages that frequently posted fake news to better understand how to manage it. 
“To do this, we categorized pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or trying to game feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares,” Facebook said in a statement. 
While this won’t stop all fake news from appearing, it may take more scrolling down than before to see a potentially bogus news story.
For some users, the solution to preventing the spread of fake news is simple; check the sources, check the content and do some self-research. But with the structure of the decentralized internet, sharing click-bait articles is just too convenient and entertaining.  A man running a fake news site told the BBC that he gets around 2 million people a month reading his fake stories.
“People read a headline and then don’t even bother to check the content before they share it,” he told the BBC in November. “Half the people fall for the stories, the other half are genuinely entertained by what they read. 
Maddox suggests that if people come across someone sharing potential fake news, they should speak up and suggest a possible alternative.
“I would just inform them, let them know, ‘Hey this isn’t a reliable source. I would turn to something more reliable.’”