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    October 13, 2024 ABA Task Force for American Democracy

    How partisan polarization drives the spread of fake news

    Mathias Osmundsen, Michael Bang Petersen, and Alexander Bor, Brookings, May 13, 2021
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    Summary

    This article describes the authors’ study, which concluded that political polarization is the primary psychological motivation behind political fake news sharing on Twitter (now X). The authors argue that, overall, fake news sharing is fueled by the same motivations that drive other partisan behavior, including sharing partisan news from mainstream, credible sources.

    To examine the motivations behind fake news sharing on Twitter, the authors studied 2,300 American Twitter users between December 2018 and January 2019. The users completed a survey about their partisan affiliations and identity, with questions on their political party affiliation, positive and negative feelings towards Republicans and Democrats, as well as measures of political knowledge. The authors then got permission to scrape these users’ tweets and link this data to their survey responses. They scraped 2.7 million tweets, which were then coded as sharing either mainstream or false news articles. This data allowed them to link the news people share on Twitter with patterns in survey data.

    Key Findings

    1. Fake news accounted for a small part of participants’ news sharing activity during the timeframe studied.
    2. A majority of shared fake news stories came from “pro-Republican” outlets and were shared by people who identified as Republicans. Meanwhile, about 60% of mainstream news articles originated from “pro-Democratic” outlets.
    3.  Political partisanship—and especially self-reported animosity towards the opposing party—strongly predicted fake news sharing. This suggests that, in an increasingly polarized United States, people are motivated to share news articles that are consistent with their partisanship, even when they recognize that information as coming from dubious sources. This contrasts with the “ignorance” theory of fake news sharing, whereby ignorance and inattention leads people to share false information.
    4. Republicans may share more fake news than Democrats because of differences in the supply of “politically useful” news content for each group. By analyzing news headlines, the authors conclude that mainstream media seems to cover Democrats more favorably/less negatively than Republicans. Thus Democrats may have an easier time finding information that fulfills their partisan goals in mainstream media sources, whereas Republicans might need to turn to extreme news sources to find information that caters to their political tastes. 

    Key Recommendations

    “The focus on fake news may be a red herring. It distracts us not only from the real problem, but also from its causes.” Polarization that predates the emergence of social media is a root cause that needs to be addressed through “difficult policy reforms that can reverse decades of increasing inequality and marginalization.”