Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online mis-information by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is strongly correlated with right-leaning partisanship, we also uncover a similar, though weaker, trend among left-leaning users. Because of the correlation be-tween a user’s partisanship and their position within a partisan echo chamber, these types of influ-ence are confounded. To disentangle their effects, we performed a regression analysis and found that vulnerability to misinformation is most strongly influenced by partisanship for both left- and right-leaning users.

Neutral bots probe political bias on social media

“…The fact that Right-leaning drifters are exposed to considerably more low-credibility content than other groups is in line with previous findings that conservative users are more likely to engage with misinformation on social media 20,49 . Our experiment suggests that the ecosystem can lead completely unbiased agents to this condition, therefore, it is not necessary to impute the vulnerability to characteristics of individual social media users.…”

“…However, @BreitbartNews is one of the most popular conservative news sources on Twitter (Supplementary Table 1). While further experiments may corroborate our findings using alternative sources as initial friends, attempting to factor out the correlation between conservative leanings and vulnerability to misinformation 20,49 may yield a less-representative sample of politically active accounts.…”

“…However, the popularity of an initial friend among sources with similar political bias is a confounding factor for drifter influence. Online influence is therefore affected by the echo-chamber characteristics of the social network, which are correlated with partisanship, especially on the political Right 20,48 . In summary, drifters following more partisan news sources receive more politically aligned followers, becoming embedded in denser echo chambers and gaining influence within those partisan communities.…”

“…At the same time, discussions on social media tend to be polarized around critical yet controversial topics like elections [6][7][8] , vaccination 9 , and climate change 10 . Polarization is often accompanied by the segregation of users with incongruent views into socalled echo chambers [11][12][13][14][15][16] , homogeneous online communities that have been associated with ideology radicalization and misinformation spreading [17][18][19][20] .…”

Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions

“…There is some evidence suggesting that political misinformation circulating online in the United States disproportionately promotes issues and candidates favored by conservatives. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, falsehoods shared via social media benefited the Republican candidate more often than the Democratic candidate (25), and this political misinformation was shared most frequently among relatively small, tightly knit groups of conservatives (26)(27)(28)(29). This pattern may be amplified by bots, automated social media accounts that are often used to share political misinformation (30).…”