The phrase “fake news” has entered the vernacular after a presidential campaign in which, according to a BuzzFeed study, Facebook engagements for fake news stories topped Facebook engagements for authentic stories during the last three months of the election.

According to BuzzFeed, these fabrications included Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump for president and the mysterious death of the FBI agent who looked into Hillary Clinton’s case.

Yet President-elect Trump recently used the term “fake news” to describe CNN, a mainstream media organization that is different in structure and content from the fake news on Facebook.

Assistant professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations Kjerstin Thorson, whose research centers on the role of social and digital media in politics, said there is no consensus definition of fake news.

“That’s why anyone can use it, because we haven’t gone through the effort of determining what is fake news and what is not fake news,” Thorson said. “To me, I would reserve the use of the term ‘fake news’ for items that were intentionally created as false information or as misinformation."

Thorson said it can be a slippery slope even for good journalists when it comes to misinformation spreading.

Facebook specifically has come under fire for the spread of fake news on its platform.

According to a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of American adults get news from social media and 66 percent of Facebook users use the site as a news source. Facebook has recently implemented a few potential solutions for the fake news epidemic, including attaching contradictory fact-checks to false stories, CNN reported.

Yet fact-checks might have little effect on users’ preexisting biases. According to a research project Thorson completed on fact-checking on Twitter, the few influential users who follow fact-checkers are far more likely to retweet or share fact checks that confirm their political stances. And since users are also unlikely to follow or like influential users of opposing political beliefs, they are unlikely to hear about the lies of the candidate they support on their social media timelines.

“Your own personal action (of sharing something), which makes a lot of sense in the moment, ends up biasing the flow of communication down the line,” Thorson said. “And that’s fairly new. Of course, people always told people the news. You were hanging out in 1970, I’d say, ‘Hey, you hear the thing about the thing?’ But now the scale is so much bigger. And I think we really need to figure out how big a problem that is, and we need to help people understand that.”

Another solution Facebook has used to combat the problem of fake news, according to CNN, is tagging blatantly false reports with a “fake” label.

However, MSU psychology professor David Hambrick, who recently co-authored an article in Slate magazine about the effects of fake news, said users might remember the details of a story later on without remembering the source or any labels attached to it.

“A good example of that is the Pope endorsing Donald Trump,” Hambrick said. “That was a fake story published in the non-existent Denver Guardian. If you could remember that it was fake, or that there was a label — that’s what Facebook has been talking about lately, these warnings — then in the future, when you retrieve that piece of information, you would also remember that, oh, it was labeled as a fake. Well, the research that we talk about in this article says that people forget warnings. This is contextual information of a sort that people forget. And without this contextual information, you can’t differentiate when you recall the information later, whether or not it was real.”

Facebook users might also believe fake news sources because they have difficulty differentiating fake news sources from real ones. Thorson, Hambrick and MSU journalism professor of practice Amy Haimerl all cited a lack of media literacy education as one reason users might be susceptible to fake news.

The Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles advocates for greater media literacy education from both teachers and parents to improve the next generation’s ability to understand the media environment.

They recommend looking at five key components of a story to analyze whether or not to believe it: authorship and understanding who wrote the story, format by understanding the way in which media stories are organized, audience through understanding the differences in interpretation between audience members, content through understanding the values the story promotes and purpose through understanding what the journalists and sources were looking to gain from contributing to the story.

Center for Media Literacy president and CEO Tessa Jolls said educating young people could help prevent fake online news from becoming a long-term issue, but in the immediate future, adults must work on their media literacy.

“I believe there should be a really great advertising campaign, over time, that really communicates about the core concepts and key questions, the media literacy fundamentals, a media literacy understanding, so that adults start learning,” Jolls said. “Let’s look at an issue like the environment, or like smoking. We were definitely, as a society, able to teach adults through the media, and through media messaging. And so I think the media industry, whether it’s through technology or through entertainment, whether it’s media itself, I believe they really have a social and moral responsibility to help fill some of these gaps, especially for adults.”