THE SPREAD OF FAKE NEWS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR STUDENTS OF ADAMAWA STATE UNIVERSITY, MUBI: ISSUES AND POSSIBLE REMEDIES

The age of information has ushered in new and exciting possibilities for advancement in technology which can enhance our lives and experience. Education is a field that stands to gain significantly from these improvements. With the outbreak of Covid-19 toward the end of 2019, the need for emergency lockdown procedures brought with it the sudden introduction of Emergency Remote Teaching. ERT demanded that educators pivot rapidly in terms of how learning took place in educational institutions. A gap between educator and student was created by this shift, allowing the space for change - with its inevitable challenges. Digital platforms and social media proved to be the ideal solution to bridge the gap, by allowing educators and students to stay connected during enforced isolation. With the introduction of social media platforms leading into the 21st century, the way in which people communicate and share information has changed greatly (Ortiz-Ospina, 2018), possibly permanently (Khechine, 2020). This study therefore examines The Prevalence of Fake News and Its Impact on Students of Adamawa State University, Mubi: Challenges and Remedies". The aims were to examine undergraduate students’ level of exposure to fake news, establish the effect of fake news, measure the level of media literacy on fake news by identification by undergraduate students’ and determine the contributions of media literacy in the fight against fake news among undergraduate students of Adamawa State University, Mubi . Anchored on the Uses and gratifications theory. The study sampled 140 respondents selected through simple random sampling technique. The study adopted the survey design using structured questionnaire to generate data from the field. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics of frequency, percentage and mean. Findings show that undergraduate students were exposed large amount of fake news on daily basis so the rate is very high as they claimed that fake news is very common that no one can deny not encountering it in life and that they have experienced nothing less than five piece of fake news daily and fake news has dominated over factual news among students and their friends and they had been exposed to the same type of fake news in school. and that Students accepted that fake news in its deceptive form make them to lose trust on conventional media contents and accepted that they are not too sure that their perception of news will be better because of the large amount of fake news in circulation. Therefore, the study showed that there is a negative effect of fake news on the students’ perception of factual information. The study recommended that exposure of students to fake news should be discouraged at any given time so as to encourage students to seek factual information. Students should be educated with media literacy policy to increase their knowledge about fake news and its pattern of operation on social media so as to make them easy to identify