Table of Contents Online News and Media Literacy in CambodiaUnderstanding of Fake NewsMass Media and Psychological TheoryThe majority of Cambodia's population is made up of young people, including 65.3% are under 30 years old (UNDP, 2017). The age of young people is between 15 and 24 years, but it is subject to defining an international perspective (UNGA, 1985). Cambodia has defined youth as young people and their age ranges from 14 to 30 years (Cambodia Youth Department, 2002). A Khmer proverb says that “bamboo shoots are the bamboo of the future”, which means that young people are bamboo shoots who will become the human resource for the country's development (UNFPA, 2017). Thus, the number of young people enrolled in university increased by around 207,000 between 2009 and 2013 (MOEY, 2013). Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original EssayMost young people go online, and Facebook is the main platform for these young people to communicate simply by having a smartphone with an Internet connection (DW, 2016). One in five people own at least one smartphone and now turn to the internet for information (The Asia Foundation, 2016). The increase in social media usage has grown significantly and the latest number of active internet users has increased by 2.1 million in the last year. Facebook has become a dominant social media platform for Cambodian users with a total of 4.8 million in 2017. In terms of content, there are graphics, photos and external links with batches of videos (Geek in Cambodia, 2017). However, Information Minister Khieu Kanharith expressed concern that most Facebook users read and share news articles without verifying their legitimacy (The Phnom Penh Post, 2016). Fake news is nothing new. A historical example is the "Thai Embassy Protest Riots" of January 2003, in which a local Cambodian newspaper reported that a famous Thai superstar had said that Cambodia had stolen Angkor Wat and that she It would not appear in Cambodia until it was returned to Thailand. The report was picked up by Khmer media such as television, radio and newspapers. Therefore, this news pushed a stronger and stronger nationalist idea, to the point that eventually rioters burned down the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh, destroying a building on January 29, 2003. Additionally, the Cambodian government banned all Thai television programs in the country Hinton, A. (2006). In 2016, an announcement from the Thai government spread like a stain across Cambodia's online networks: canned food made in Thailand had been contaminated with HIV. At the request of an anonymous boss, it is said, more than 200 HIV-positive specialists deliberately stained untold things with their blood. On Facebook, on Twitter, in mass messages, the message was clear: no Thai item was copyrighted (SEA Globe, 2017). Snopes fack-check published an article on this issue in late 2016. The article talked about the Thai government being informed that the rumor about HIV with canned goods was false information with no concrete evidence to support it. such accusation, including to everyone. Thai ministries involved, such as the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives and the Food and Drug Administration of Thailand, have stated that all canned food products mustbe certified before export. In July 2017, the Home Office said it would explore an anecdote about children. prostitution in Phnom Penh which returned to CNN this week, a day after a major writers' union condemned the United States for organizing to re-use "fake news" that could harm Cambodia's universal notoriety . Another relative of fake news is clickbait, which is now one of the new emerging issues on the internet. Offering the most attractive titles and encouraging people to click on them has become a new way to make money on the Internet (The Communicator, 2017). The results of this study mainly explain why fake news is a real problem and how college students believe fake news online. Therefore, the understanding of fake news will be taken seriously once these university students are aware of the existence of fake news on their Facebook. Importantly, media literacy will also be a major course to help students understand media and information better in order to make a decision that will impact their lives. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports recently introduced media education as a new official high school curriculum for a new academic year (CCIM, 2016). Therefore, this research study can make more contribution to the ministry to extend the program up to university level as one of the core year subjects, so that the impact of media education will be at larger scale. Furthermore, the results of this research will help students understand why media literacy is important to them in daily life, as they regularly consume information online, as a number of them still have limited knowledge in media education. The literature here shows that fake news is a very new problem from traditional media to online media, so critical thinking about media will increase among university students as they will be able to evaluate news on social media if they can trust this news or how they can verify it whether it is fake news or reliable news. Media education can enable students to read and write fluently. Audiovisual language would have greater competitive power to better flourish in our multimedia culture (Thoman & Jolls, 2005). Online information and media literacy in Cambodia Cambodian media have also recently transformed from traditional media to multimedia and online media which are an extension of print, radio and television. Some media outlets have produced a professional and ethical context while others have simply created their online platform just to follow the trend, but their content is still not that professional. (ICC, 2015). Some famous local online media such as dap-news, post-Khmer, can, sabay, tmeytmey, khmerload and khmer-note produce news, entertainment and breaking news. Some news websites simply translate, copy and paste information from other sources and publish it on their website, which looks attractive to readers. Additionally, as media shifts from traditional to online, more and more advertisers are going online and the number of online readers is growing rapidly year over year. The latest update shows that the number of Cambodian internet users is 5,000,000 as of November 2015 and at the same time there are 3300,300 Facebook users in Cambodia (internetworldstats, 2015). Although online media is now attracting more and more attention when journalists have also changed their style of writing their reporting to suit the nature of online media. Therefore, many online news websites fail to maintain the quality and value of information because they simply want to attract more readers and viewers to their website. In order to attract more readers to their sites, these media websites simply create news content with entertainment, rumors, gossip, and sex-related stories (Bun Y, 2015). As readers are also more interested in this type of entertainment, gossip content is more than critical news content. Reflecting this reader preference, we can clearly see that the number of Internet users is huge but they still have limited media literacy. Media literacy refers to “the skillful application of literacy skills to media and technology messages.” It has long been an important part of thoughtful civic engagement, and the digital revolution has made it even more crucial. » (Weiss, 2013). Furthermore, Weiss (2013) stated that true media literacy means that a reader does not understand the meaning beyond the message when consuming media. Understanding Fake News Fake news is a popular topic during the 2016 US presidential election, people were talking about the impact of fake news on social media. 14% of Americans admit that social media is their most important source of information, and some are likely to believe fake news that favors their preferred candidates in the election (Hunt and Mathew, 2017). News reports mislead American adults about 75 percent of the time, according to a new large-scale study by Ipsos Public Affairs for BuzzFeed News. The study also found that people who view Facebook as a notable source of news are likely to see counterfeit news just as accurately as people who rely less on the scene for their news. There are three main reasons why fake news exists on the internet. First, democratization where everyone has the right to say what they want online. Secondly, it is the economic interest that these websites attract visitors by clicking on fake news. Last but not least, the fact that people do not have the ability to identify information (Gary Liu, (2017)) degrades media literacy (Gary Liu, (2017). Fake news is defined as a story invented, which today constitutes a new challenge for the new industry (New York, 2017) The definition of fake news: 1) unintentional reporting errors, 2) rumors that do not come from a press article). particular 3) conspiracy theories (these are, by definition, difficult to verify as true or false, and they are usually created by people who believe them to be true) 4) satire that is not likely to be misinterpreted as factual; 5) false statements by politicians; and 6) biased or misleading, but not entirely false, reporting (Hunt and Mathew, 2017). How is fake news different from biased or biased media or general information? Is it a harmless form of entertainment, like fiction films or novels? Or does it have higher social costs? To answer these questions, we outline a model of information supply and demand loosely based on a model developed formally in.