Index Online news and media literacy in Cambodia Understanding of fake news Mass media and psychological theory The majority of the Cambodian population is made up of young people, of which 65.3% is under 30 years old (UNDP, 2017 ). The age of the young people is between 15 and 24 years, but is subject to defining an international perspective (UNGA, 1985). Cambodia has defined youth as youth and their ages range from 14 to 30 years (Department of Youth of Cambodia, 2002). A Khmer proverb says that “bamboo shoots are the bamboo of the future”, meaning that the young are bamboo shoots that will grow to become the human resource for the country's development (UNFPA, 2017). Therefore, the number of young people enrolling in university increased by approximately 207,000 between 2009 and 2013 (MOEY, 2013). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Most young people go online, and Facebook is the main platform through which these young people can communicate simply by having a smartphone with an Internet connection ( DW, 2016). One in five people has at least one smartphone and now uses the internet to read news (The Asia Foundation, 2016). The increase in social media usage has grown significantly, and according to the latest update, the number of active internet users increased by 2.1 million 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 some graphics, photos and external links with video groups (Geek in Cambodia, 2017). However, Information Minister Khieu Kanharith expressed concern that most Facebook users read and share news articles without checking their legitimacy (The Phnom Penh Post, 2016). Fake news is nothing new. A historical example is the January 2003 "Riots Erupt From Thai Embassy Protest" in which a local Cambodian newspaper reported that a famous Thai superstar had claimed that Cambodia had stolen Angkor Wat and that she would not appear in Cambodia until it was returned to Thailand . The news was picked up by Khmer media such as television, radio and newspapers. Therefore, this news had pushed an ever stronger nationalist idea, so much so that rioters eventually burned down the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh, destroying a building on January 29, 2003. Furthermore, the Cambodian government had banned all Thai television programs in country Hinton, A. (2006). In late 2016, a warning from the Thai government spread like a stain on Cambodia's online network: canned food produced in Thailand was contaminated with HIV. It was said that at the request of an anonymous boss, more than 200 HIV-positive specialists had deliberately contaminated untold objects with their blood. On Facebook, on Twitter, in mass messages, the message was clear: no Thai object was protected (SEA Globe, 2017). Snopes fack-check published an article on this topic in late 2016. The article was about the Thai government being informed that the rumor about HIV with canned goods was false information with no concrete evidence to make such an accusation, even to All involved Thai ministries 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 must be certified before export. In July 2017, the Interior Ministry said it would explore an anecdote about child prostitution in Phnom Penh that ran again this week on CNN,the day after a conspicuous writers' union condemned the United States to organize to reuse a "fake news" story that could negatively affect Cambodia's universal notoriety. Another relative of fake news is clickbait, which is now one of the new emerging problems on the Internet. Finding the most attractive headlines means getting people to click on them has become a new way to make money on the Internet (the Communicator, 2017). The findings of this research will mainly concern why fake news is a real problem and how college students believe in fake news online. Therefore, understanding fake news will be taken seriously once college students learn about the existence of fake news on their Facebook. Importantly, media literacy will also be an important course to help students better understand media and information to make a decision that will impact their lives. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports recently introduced media literacy as the new official high school curriculum for a new academic year (CCIM, 2016). Therefore, this research study can provide more inputs to the Ministry to expand the curriculum up to university level as one of the foundation year subjects, so that the impact of media literacy is on a larger scale. Furthermore, the findings of this research will help students understand why media literacy is important for them in daily life as they regularly consume news online as a number of them still have limited knowledge of media literacy. The literature here shows that fake news is a very new emerging problem from traditional to online media, so critical thinking about media will increase among college students as they will be able to evaluate news on social media whether they can trust that news or how can they verify whether it is fake news or reliable news. Media literacy can enable students to read and write fluently audiovisual language would have greater competitive power to better thrive in our multimedia culture (Thoman & Jolls, 2005). Online News and Media Literacy in Cambodia Cambodian media has also recently transformed from traditional media to multimedia and online media which is the extension of print media, 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 contents are still not that professional. (CCI, 2015). Some popular local online media such as dap-news, post-Khmer, can, sabay, tmeytmey, khmerload and khmer-note are producing latest news, entertainment and information. Some news websites simply translate, copy and paste from other sources and post them on their own website, so that they are attractive to readers. Additionally, as media is transitioning from traditional to online, more and more advertisers are going online and the number of online readers is rapidly increasing year on year. The latest update of the number of Cambodian Internet users is 5,000,000 in November 2015 and at the same time there are 3,300,300 Facebook users in Cambodia (internetworldstats, 2015). Although online media is now receiving more and more attention when journalists have also changed the style of writing their news to suit the nature of online media. Therefore, many online news websites fail to maintain the quality and value of news as they only want to get more readersand viewers on their website. 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). Since readers are also more interested in that type of entertainment, gossip content is more numerous. than critical news content. Reflecting on 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 technological messages. It has long been an important part of thoughtful civic engagement, and the digital revolution has made it even more critical.” (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 in the 2016 US presidential election, people were talking about the impact fake news has on them 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 favorite candidates in elections (Hunt and Mathew, 2017). News content misleads American adults about 75% of the time, according to a new large-scale overview led by Ipsos Public Affairs for BuzzFeed News. The study also found that people who refer to Facebook as a notable news source are likely to view the characteristics of fake news just as identically as people who are less dependent on the stage for news. There are three main reasons why fake news exists on the Internet. First, the democratization that everyone has the right to say what they want online. Secondly, it is the economic interest in which these websites gain viewers by clicking on fake news. Last but not least is the degradation of media literacy due to people not having the ability to identify news (Gary Liu, (2017). Fake news is defined as a made-up story which represents a new challenge today for the new industry (New York, 2017). The definition of fake news: 1) inadvertent reporting errors, 2) rumors that do not originate from a particular news article 3) conspiracy theories (these are, for deinition, difficult to verify as true or false, and are are typically originated by people who believe them to be true) 4) satire that is unlikely to be misconstrued as factual; 5) false statements by politicians; and 6) reports that are biased or misleading but not completely false (Hunt and Mathew, 2017). How does fake news differ from biased or biased or general media? Is it a harmless form of entertainment, like movies or fictional novels? Or does it have greater social costs? To answer these questions, we sketch a model of news supply and demand loosely based on a model formally developed in (Stone, 2016). Two distinct incentives can lead companies to skew their reporting in the direction of consumer precedents. First, when real state feedback is limited, rational consumers will judge an arm to be of higher quality when its ratios are closer to consumers' priors (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2006). Second, consumers may prefer reports that confirm their priors due to psychological utility ( Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005 ). (Stone, 2016) show how these incentives can lead to biased reporting.