Boston University. Amazeen's research interests are cross-disciplinary at the intersection of advertising, journalism, and political communication. She studies the effects of message features and audience characteristics on persuasion, resistance, and information processing.

Recently, substantial attention has been paid to the spread of highly partisan and often factually incorrect information (i.e., so-called “fake news”) on social media. In this study, we attempt to extend current knowledge on this topic by exploring the degree to which individual levels of ideological extremity, social trust, and trust in the news media are associated with the dissemination of countermedia content, or web-based, ideologically extreme information that uses false, biased, misleading, and hyper-partisan claims to counter the knowledge produced by the mainstream news media. To investigate these possible associations, we used a combination of self-report survey data and trace data collected from Facebook and Twitter. The results suggested that sharing countermedia content on Facebook is positively associated with ideological extremity and negatively associated with trust in the mainstream news media. On Twitter, we found evidence that countermedia content sharing is negatively associated with social trust.

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Using a method incorporating both survey and trace data measures, this study presented and tested a theoretical model for understanding political expression on Facebook. The data suggested that self-reported measures of offline civic engagement, bonded social capital, and ideological extremity were predictive of a self-reported measure of general online political engagement. For its part, self-reported levels of online political engagement were positively and significantly associated with observed political expression on Facebook. These results are discussed in the context of both on and offline political connection and communication.

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