  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.
