The Differences of “Fake News” And “Rumor” From The Perspective of Academic Documents, Scholars and Theoreticians of Journalism, News and Communications Sciences

The widespread dissemination of "fake news" on the social media as the news that deliberately deceives users, has been an important threat to today's interconnected societies. The full recognition of this phenomenon, which has attracted serious attention of media and researchers after the 2016 US election, is crucial for identifying and combating with it. Among all the methods and issues that can help us to understand the fake news, we can understand the differences in this particular concept and other similar concepts that are closely related to the notion of fake news; One of the oldest words in this area is the concept of "Rumor" that at first glance is very close to the concept of fake news; therefore, if a clear explanation of this differences is presented, in fact a more precise meaning of "fake news" can be revealed. In order to achieve this goal, in addition to studying the scientific documents, 17 experts of news and media were interviewed, then by analyzing the data using the thematic analysis, the differences between these two phenomena were presented in three themes "difference in production", "difference in content" and "difference in the audience".