Can Someone Help me to summaries this Introduction The increase of fake news is becoming a worldwide issue (McGonagle, 2

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Can Someone Help me to summaries this
Introduction
The increase of fake news is becoming a worldwide issue
(McGonagle, 2017). Though fake news is not novel, however, it is
now worrisome because of social media popularity which permits
interaction and diffusion of new ideas (Zhou & Zafarani, 2018).
Consequently, social media users can advance ideas or spread the
news through shares, likes or retweets; hence, they are invariably
exposed to an uncontrollable type of information especially news
that is coming from independent authors. As such, social media is
now a place to disseminate misinformation and fake news rapidly
(Rampersad et al., 2019). It has been shown that social media is an
influential device for the spreading of large amount of unfiltered
content (Lazer et al., 2018), authorising a misinformation
phenomenon and consequently aggravating the possibility of
manipulating the public’s perception of reality through the
dissemination of fake news content (Ireton & Posetti, 2018).
Duffy et al. (2019) defined fake news as concocted content that
copycat legitimate news, presented subtly to lure the public into
believing it is legitimate. Fake news sharing has become rampant in
today’s digital world. This suggests that even some government
officials and individuals engage in the proliferation of
misinformation to a large audience to suit their agenda (Rampersad
et al., 2019). Thus, fake news has touched virtually every aspect
of our life (Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019), and the most
worrisome in recent months is the circulation of false content in
this period of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak
(Hou et al., 2020). In December 2019, a novel virus called
COVID-19 was reported in China, and in recent months the virus has
spread to other parts of the world, killing many people. Initially,
it was alleged to be transmitted from animals to humans. However,
it is now transmitted from human to human via fomites, contacts,
droplets (Sahu et al., 2020). Report shows that as of May, 14, 2020
the cases of COVID-19 were over 4.4 million globally. More than 1.6
million recoveries were reported, and about 298,000 deaths (World
Health Organization [WHO], 2020). According to recent research,
many rumours and false news stories are circulating about the
COVID-19. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish fake
news from reports whose veracity should not be questioned (Huynh,
2020). Consequently, misinformation in social media has fuelled
panic among members of the public regarding the COVID-19 pandemic,
prompting governments and authorities to urge citizens to confirm
the genuineness of news stories before circulating them (Huynh,
2020; Hou et al., 2020). In this view, research has found that as
the urgency to find a treatment for COVID-19 continues across the
globe, fake news proliferation has intensified on social media,
which many experts believe is contributing to the threats of the
pandemic (Lampos et al., 2020). It has been found that false
information regarding health issues constitutes a probable threat
to public health. However, the motivations for sharing such false
information has been less well developed (Waszak et al., 2018).
Thus, the explosive growth of fake news sharing, particularly
during pandemic requires extensive research to comprehend the
nature and reasons behind fake news proliferation via social media.
Presently limited knowledge is known about predictors of fake news
proliferation. Moreover, studies focusing on fake news are limited,
but the literature is growing (Apuke & Omar, 2020). It is yet
to be known why individuals disseminate fake news content during
this COVID-19 outbreak. Prior evidence has shown that
misinformation on health issues are not new. However, the advent of
social media, which permit people to share information without
restriction, has intensified the proliferation of false content in
the health ecosystem (Waszak et al., 2018). Unlike previous
literature that studied news sharing using university students as a
sample, we focused on general social media users (Lee & Ma,
2012). It has also been shown that most of the studies on fake news
have been in the UK and US. Therefore, researchers have been
encouraged to investigate another context (Duffy et al., 2019). To
respond to this call, we selected Nigeria, a developing country
which is less well studied (Apuke & Omar, 2020; Wasserman &
Madrid-Morales, 2019) to provide another view of understanding the
global problem of fake news proliferation. Another reason for
selecting Nigeria stems from the fact that fake news in Nigeria is
discouraging medical advice, offering false medications,
stirring panic and being used for political point-scoring
(Olapegba et al., 2020). Report shows that as of May 14, 2020, the
country had about 4,971 cases of COVID-19, and 164 deaths were
recorded (Nigeria Centre for Disease Control [NCDC], 2020).
Therefore, to comprehend the predictors of fake news sharing on
social media, we developed a comprehensive model drawing from the
Uses and Gratification perspective. We extended this theory by
adding an "altruism" component. The novelty of this study is that
it extends the literature on news sharing to test fake news
propagation during COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the
gratifications obtained from prior news sharing studies could be
extended to examine fake news sharing because of the intrinsic
participatory nature of social media (Ma et al., 2014). Moreover,
the limited literature on fake news sharing prompted this research
to explore and extend to test fake news sharing using established
news sharing determinants in prior studies (Thompson et al., 2019;
Ma et al., 2014).