The threat of fake news: A systematic literature review

Purpose. Fake news is not a new phenomenon and their spreadable has increased due to the social media advent, but their actual impact remains an open question. From the management literature, it emerges that the consequences of the fake news dissemination are crucial for the brands, as in this context brands can lose the control over their marketing communication strategy. However, fake news literature reviews are few and far too little attention has been paid to summarizing the fake news’ dimensions in the various research areas. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate existing studies and to provide an appropriate systematic review about the fake news phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach. To achieve this research objective, the systematic review method was adopted. The work was divided into four phases. The phase 1 was focused on defining the research questions and the scope of the study. The phase 2 regards search criteria definition and bibliographic research. Phase 3 is dedicated to the data extraction and organization. Finally, phase 4 analyzed and synthetizes the contributions with the aim of providing a fake news framework. Findings. This review reveled fake news topic was addressed in different research areas. By analyzing 209 journal articles, we identify definitions, dimensions and theories of fake news, which we presented in form of three clusters’ dimensions, i.e. content, appearance and purpose. Moreover, two main reasons have emerged for providing fake news: (1) economic motivation and (2) ideological motivation. Finally, the fake news’ effects are presented both for users and companies. Originality. The uniqueness of this paper exists in the fact that there was not a systematic review on the analyzed topic. In conclusion, in light of the emerged framework, this research offers new prospects for empirically investigating the fake news phenomenon.