Does Fake News Affect Voting Behaviour?

Abstract

Over the last decade, the erosion of trust in public institutions and traditional media sources have been proceeding in parallel. As recent developments in media consumption have led to a proliferation of politically charged online misinformation, it is no wonder that many have been questioning whether the spread of fake news has affected the results of recent elections, contributing to the growth of populist party platforms. In this work, we aim to quantify this impact by focusing on the causal effect of the spread of misinformation over electoral outcomes in the 2018 Italian General elections. We exploit the presence of Italian and German linguistic groups in the Trento and Bolzano/Bozen autonomous provinces as an exogenous source of variation, assigning individuals into distinct filter bubbles each differently exposed to misinformation. To do so, we introduce a novel index based on text mining techniques to measure populism. Using this approach, we analyse the social media content of each party and their leaders over the course of the electoral campaign for the 2013 and 2018 elections. We then collect electoral and socio-demographic data from the region and, after constructing a proxy for exposition to misinformation, we measure the change in populist vote across the two groups in-between the two general elections, using a combination of difference-indifference and two-stageleast-squares inference methods. Our results indicate that misinformation had a negligible and non-significant effect on populist vote in Trentino and South Tyrol during the Italian 2018 general elections.

The Influence of Political Ideology on Fake News Belief: The Portuguese Case

“…However, there are some studies that address the consumption and dissemination of fake news in the European context. The investigation has sought, above all, the influence of disinformation during the electoral campaigns of several countries, as in the debate related to Brexit [26], in the Italian general elections [27], in the French elections [28] or in the German elections [6] through the coordination of social bots on twitter. The impact that disinformation has on the European Union's unification policies has also been investigated [29], especially with regard to pro-Russian propaganda and the ultranationalist, xenophobic and antiimmigration populist rhetoric that discredits the European Union project [29][30][31].…”

“…The impact that disinformation has on the European Union's unification policies has also been investigated [29], especially with regard to pro-Russian propaganda and the ultranationalist, xenophobic and antiimmigration populist rhetoric that discredits the European Union project [29][30][31]. As in the American scenario, some studies support the idea of very small audiences for fake news [27,32]. Our study adds to the current literature with a unique European perspective and could motivate future investigations in this area.…”

(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy: Questions, Platforms, and Methods

“…It is only in 2020, when we observe research based on 2018 election data, that we see a clear focus on fake news (Cantarella et al, 2020), disinformation (Pierri et al, 2020), and media manipulation (Giglietto et al, 2020).…”

“…Phase III (2018-2020) shows a return of older features as well as the consolidation of new dynamics. In terms of research questions, the paper refocused their interest on the issue of populism, but especially after 2019, this focus was coupled with parallel issues that emerged in the international debate, such as fake news (Cantarella et al, 2020) and disinformation (Pierri, Antoni & Ceri, 2020). 2018 saw a slight increase in theoretical papers, characterized by a focus on populism and its international dimensions (Bickerton & Accetti, 2018;Chiaramonte et al, 2018).…”

Measuring the effects of misinformation exposure and beliefs on behavioural intentions

“…To the best of our knowledge, only two studies have explored the consequences of fake news on real-world behaviours, both by looking at geographical patterns. Cantarella et al (2019) used linguistic differences in South Tyrol in Italy to estimate how much misinformation specific geographical areas received and whether it led to populist voting. They concluded that fake news did not significantly affect group-level voting behaviours.…”