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Introduction

The increase of fake news is becoming a worldwide issue (McGonagle, 2017). Though fake news is not novel, however, it is now worrisome because of social media popularity which permits interaction and diffusion of new ideas (Zhou & Zafarani, 2018). Consequently, social media users can advance ideas or spread the news through shares, likes or retweets; hence, they are invariably exposed to an uncontrollable type of information especially news that is coming from independent authors. As such, social media is now a place to disseminate misinformation and fake news rapidly (Rampersad et al., 2019). It has been shown that social media is an influential device for the spreading of large amount of unfiltered content (Lazer et al., 2018), authorising a misinformation phenomenon and consequently aggravating the possibility of manipulating the publics perception of reality through the dissemination of fake news content (Ireton & Posetti, 2018). Duffy et al. (2019) defined fake news as concocted content that copycat legitimate news, presented subtly to lure the public into believing it is legitimate. Fake news sharing has become rampant in todays digital world. This suggests that even some government officials and individuals engage in the proliferation of misinformation to a large audience to suit their agenda (Rampersad et al., 2019). Thus, fake news has touched virtually every aspect of our life (Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019), and the most worrisome in recent months is the circulation of false content in this period of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak (Hou et al., 2020). In December 2019, a novel virus called COVID-19 was reported in China, and in recent months the virus has spread to other parts of the world, killing many people. Initially, it was alleged to be transmitted from animals to humans. However, it is now transmitted from human to human via fomites, contacts, droplets (Sahu et al., 2020). Report shows that as of May, 14, 2020 the cases of COVID-19 were over 4.4 million globally. More than 1.6 million recoveries were reported, and about 298,000 deaths (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020). According to recent research, many rumours and false news stories are circulating about the COVID-19. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish fake news from reports whose veracity should not be questioned (Huynh, 2020). Consequently, misinformation in social media has fuelled panic among members of the public regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting governments and authorities to urge citizens to confirm the genuineness of news stories before circulating them (Huynh, 2020; Hou et al., 2020). In this view, research has found that as the urgency to find a treatment for COVID-19 continues across the globe, fake news proliferation has intensified on social media, which many experts believe is contributing to the threats of the pandemic (Lampos et al., 2020). It has been found that false information regarding health issues constitutes a probable threat to public health. However, the motivations for sharing such false information has been less well developed (Waszak et al., 2018). Thus, the explosive growth of fake news sharing, particularly during pandemic requires extensive research to comprehend the nature and reasons behind fake news proliferation via social media. Presently limited knowledge is known about predictors of fake news proliferation. Moreover, studies focusing on fake news are limited, but the literature is growing (Apuke & Omar, 2020). It is yet to be known why individuals disseminate fake news content during this COVID-19 outbreak. Prior evidence has shown that misinformation on health issues are not new. However, the advent of social media, which permit people to share information without restriction, has intensified the proliferation of false content in the health ecosystem (Waszak et al., 2018). Unlike previous literature that studied news sharing using university students as a sample, we focused on general social media users (Lee & Ma, 2012). It has also been shown that most of the studies on fake news have been in the UK and US. Therefore, researchers have been encouraged to investigate another context (Duffy et al., 2019). To respond to this call, we selected Nigeria, a developing country which is less well studied (Apuke & Omar, 2020; Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019) to provide another view of understanding the global problem of fake news proliferation. Another reason for selecting Nigeria stems from the fact that fake news in Nigeria is discouraging medical advice, offering false medications, stirring panic and being used for political point-scoring (Olapegba et al., 2020). Report shows that as of May 14, 2020, the country had about 4,971 cases of COVID-19, and 164 deaths were recorded (Nigeria Centre for Disease Control [NCDC], 2020). Therefore, to comprehend the predictors of fake news sharing on social media, we developed a comprehensive model drawing from the Uses and Gratification perspective. We extended this theory by adding an "altruism" component. The novelty of this study is that it extends the literature on news sharing to test fake news propagation during COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the gratifications obtained from prior news sharing studies could be extended to examine fake news sharing because of the intrinsic participatory nature of social media (Ma et al., 2014). Moreover, the limited literature on fake news sharing prompted this research to explore and extend to test fake news sharing using established news sharing determinants in prior studies (Thompson et al., 2019; Ma et al., 2014).