The rise of fake news in the past decade has brought with it a host of consequences, from swaying opinions on elections to generating uncertainty during a pandemic. A majority of methods developed to combat disinformation either focus on fake news content or malicious actors who generate it. However, the virality of fake news is largely dependent upon the users who propagate it. A deeper understanding of these users can contribute to the development of a framework for identifying users who are likely to spread fake news. In this work, we study the characteristics and motivational factors of fake news spreaders on social media with input from psychological theories and behavioral studies. We then perform a series of experiments to determine if fake news spreaders can be found to exhibit different characteristics than other users. Further, we investigate our findings by testing whether the characteristics we observe amongst fake news spreaders in our experiments can be applied to the detection of fake news spreaders in a real social media environment.

翻译：过去十年来,假新闻的兴起带来了一系列后果,从对选举的看法摇摆不定,到在大流行病期间产生不确定性。为打击假消息而开发的多数方法要么侧重于假新闻内容,要么侧重于制造假新闻的恶意行为者。然而,假新闻的病毒性在很大程度上取决于传播新闻的用户。对这些用户的更深入了解有助于建立一个框架,用以识别可能传播假新闻的用户。在这项工作中,我们研究社交媒体上假新闻传播者的特点和动机因素,从心理理论和行为研究中提供投入。然后我们进行一系列实验,以确定能否发现假新闻传播者表现出不同于其他用户的特征。此外,我们通过测试我们实验中在假新闻传播者中观察到的特征是否可用于在真正的社交媒体环境中检测假新闻传播者。