Partisan polarization is the primary psychological motivation behind political fake news sharing on Twitter

Abstract

The rise of “fake news” is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of “fake news” on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake news ignorant and lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking to disrupt the social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasingly polarized political environment? This manuscript is the first to test these competing hypotheses based on a careful mapping of psychological profiles linked to behavioral data and a sentiment analysis of shared news headlines from over 2,300 American Twitter users. The findings contradict the ignorance perspective, but provide some support for the disruption perspective and strong support for the partisan polarization perspective. Thus, individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share “fake news.” Overall, our findings demonstrate that “fake news” sharing is fueled by the same psychological motivations that drive other forms of partisan behavior, including sharing partisan news from traditional and credible news sources.

"Fact-checking" videos reduce belief in misinformation and improve the quality of news shared on Twitter

“…These findigns stand in stark contrast with recent findings showing that strong Republicans are much more likely to share pro-Republican fake news than Democrats (e.g. Osmundsen et al 2020).…”

“…Empowering citizens to counter the threat of "fake news" necessitates an understanding of the psychological factors shaping the decision to share false news stories. Convincing someone to stop sharing "fake news" would require different tools depending on whether they believe these news and share them with good faith, whether they find them funny and post them to entertain their (potentially unassuming) followers or whether they share to smear dirt on their partisan opponents (Osmundsen et al 2020). Educational fact-checking interventions assume (often implicitly) that people are motivated by a particular set of motivations, which social psychologists call accuracy motivations (Pennycook et al 2020).…”

“…Elderly social media users -arguably due to shortfalls in digital media literacy and a failure to discern "fake" from "real" online -are among the worst offenders when it comes to sharing "fake news" on multiple social media platforms (Guess, Nagler and Tucker 2019;Osmundsen et al 2020). Finally, Guess et al (2020) recently demonstrated that exposure to Facebook's "Tips to Spot False News," a short list of simple tools for identifying misleading news, improved the ability to discern between false and mainstream news story headlines; an improvement that remained measurable more than two weeks later after the intervention.…”

“…As this is a post-hoc analysis, and we analyze the psychological antecedents of "fake news" sharing with partially overlapping data reported elsewhere(Osmundsen et al 2020), we limit our analysis to simple descriptive comparisons here.…”

Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing

“…Interventions designed to detect and tag falsehoods (i.e., fact‐checking) in a way that decreases belief may not be sufficient (discussed below; see also Mourão & Robertson, 2019). If people are motivated to share fake news in order to signal one's political identity, increase out‐party derogation, generate chaos, or make money, then they will likely place less value on whether stories are true or false, as long as the stories further their political agenda (see Osmundsen et al., 2020). Further, these motives are not necessarily uniquely related to misinformation.…”