The Doctoral School of Communication, Public Relations and Advertising is announcing for the 21st of July 2022 the defense of the thesis: Health-Related Fake News. Case Study: Online Health Information Seeking and Sharing Behavior on Social Media among Romanian Retirees Aged 50+ during the COVID-19 Pandemic, authored by Ioana Palade (Moldovan) from the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences.

Ioana completed her thesis within the European Doctorate of the Babeș-Bolyai University, being the first Ph.D. student from the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences who completed her thesis within this initiative. The thesis summary can be found below:

In recent years robust scholarship focusing on the topic of disinformation and fake news was published. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified this phenomenon and increased the dissemination of fake news on social media. The present research focuses on health-related fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania and analyses retirees aged 50 plus. The main objective of this exploratory research is to analyze how this particular group interacted with health information on social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp during the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the complexity of the topic and the particularities of the analyzed group, a mixed methodology approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, was applied in the present research. Thus, the research methods used were a survey, several in-depth interviews, and content analysis of the most influential post containing fake news from a public group of Romanian retirees on Facebook. Findings indicate that social media are important for this age group and that there are issues regarding their interaction with fake news distributed on social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp during the COVID-19 pandemic.