Given that approximately half of Internet users use Facebook to access news, it is no surprise that social media are increasingly seen as a viable source of political information. Despite the fact that the average social media user only clicks on a small fraction of political content available in their News Feed, social media use correlates with political knowledge. From where, then, does this knowledge come? We argue that Facebook’s News Feed itself, with its short article previews, provides enough political information for learning to occur. However, this learning comes with an additional consequence: audiences who only read article previews think they know more than they actually do, especially individuals who are motivated to seek emotions. While we are agnostic to the normative implications of such overconfidence, it is worth noting that similar behaviors are associated with political efficacy, knowledge, and participation.
One noteworthy characteristic of Donald Trump’s candidacy and subsequent presidency is his willingness to use racial rhetoric. This is especially the case on Twitter, where he communicates directly with millions of followers. This article utilizes a survey experiment to understand how Trump’s tweets influence subjects’ revealed racial attitudes. Subjects are exposed to one of three tweets made by Trump: a control tweet about the economy, a tweet with an implicitly racist message, or a tweet with an explicitly racist message. Analyses indicate that while exposure to racist messages does not influence respondents’ issue prioritization, both implicitly and explicitly racist messages interact with racial resentment to increase the propensity to describe African-Americans in starkly stereotypical and negative language. These findings suggest that the norm of racial equality, long thought to dampen support for elites who invoke explicitly racist rhetoric, has weakened in the Trump era.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.