*Current Study*

Loos et al. [2] conducted an empirical study on 27 children aged 11 and 12 from the Netherlands—"Safe the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus": a hoax revisited. Or: How vulnerable are school children to Fake News? An online source was used in the research: the hoax website https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/, originally used by Leu et al. [4] in research on online reading comprehension, which led to other studies on fake news using di fferent research designs, but the same online source.

One of the researchers was presented to the children by their teacher in the classroom. Both the students and the teacher were told that the study would look at children's ability to understand an online text; then, the students were instructed to access the website link, read the information, and click on any part of the site. They were encouraged to also search for any online information they wanted, and the site had been automatically translated into Dutch. The school children were then given a questionnaire and were asked to answer several questions, including "*If Greenpeace would ask you to save this animal, would you support this and sign the petition?*". The results of the Dutch study revealed that only two out of the 27 children in the research classified the website as false. The authors explain that there is a possibility that the students' responses were influenced by the environment in which the experiment was conducted—the classroom, in the presence of the teacher, as well as by the emotional involvement with the subject of the site—an animal in danger of going extinct.

This study aims to assess Romanian children and adolescents' ability to distinguish truthful information from fake news and test the theory based on other studies' [2,4,6,7,28] findings, claiming that digital natives cannot recognize fake news. In this study, two research questions are answered:


Similarly to the previous study, the first part of this research is based on exploratory research, using one-group post-test only quasi-experimental design, mixed with qualitative debriefing sessions on a sample of N = 54 Romanian children and teenagers (26 girls and 28 boys) from two age categories: 10–11 years old and 18–19 years old. All participants lived in the same small city and went to a public school with no fake news, digital literacy, or online skills programs. Parental consent for all minor participants was obtained before the study. The research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of SNSPA (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration)1. The research conducted in Romania was based on the study conducted by Loos et al. [2], following the same structure, but using a di fferent online source—http://salvamjacalopul.wordpress.com, a website presenting information on an animal that does not exist. The choice not to use the tree octopus website was made based on two reasons: its aspect is considerably di fferent from the way most websites look today, as it was built more than twenty years ago; also, the content presented by the site could be a limit for the research, because it could not be possible for an octopus to be part of the Romanian fauna, which could have corrupted the way subjects perceived the site.

When discussing research design, it is important to make a few mentions about the language used in the experiment. It cannot be easily disputed that "English has acquired this 'hyper-central' role not because it is a superior or intrinsically more useful language, but as a reflection of geo-political realities." [40] (p. 14). Even though there are some relevant studies looking at the influence language—and especially English—can have on the trust in media outlets [41], both the website and the research instrument were constructed in Romanian, as a considerable number of the participants were not fluent English speakers. The website gives diverse information about the animal, a considerable amount of it being enunciated as a mockery, following the original website's style: *Jackalopes are wild*

<sup>1</sup> Note that the Ethics Committee at SNSPA does not have an identification code. The ethics certificate for the current research (with no identification number) has been issued by the Ethics Committee at SNSPA prior to the research and it could be available at any request.

*animals and should not live in captivity. [* ... *] Also, they're hard to keep on a leash; Participate in marches dressed as a jackalope and have a friend attack you in a lumberjack costume to raise awareness*.

Participants were asked to access the website and complete a questionnaire about the online source, then the researcher explained the purpose of the study and spoke about the fake news phenomenon and its negative impact. It was explained to the students that they were randomly selected to participate in a study whose purpose is to measure the ability of digital natives to understand an online text. After being presented with this research objective, they received through the Facebook or the WhatsApp group of the class the link that led to the website created by the researcher for this study. Another difference from the Dutch study research design was that the students participated in the experiment without receiving an introduction about the fake news phenomenon, in order to avoid priming.

The research instrument was constructed similarly to the questionnaire used in the Dutch study [2], being composed of five questions:


Students were told that they could read all the information on the site, including those presented in the secondary sections of the source, that they could search for additional information on the Internet, and that there was no time limit for website observation. After spending enough time learning about the topic presented by the website, the students were offered the questionnaire, which was completed anonymously. The researcher then explained that the *jackalope* does not exist, revealed the real objective of the study, and spoke to them about the importance of the ability to recognize fake news in the online environment. The open discussions following the experiment had the purpose of exploring the ways children and adolescents approach the fake news identifying process and the aspects that tend to potentiate the effects of fake news.
