Examining Partisan Asymmetries in Fake News Sharing and the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompt Interventions

Abstract

The spread of misinformation has become a central concern in American politics. Recent studies of social media sharing suggest that Republicans are considerably more likely to share fake news than Democrats. However, such inferences are confounded by the far greater supply of right-leaning fake news—Republicans may indeed be more prone to sharing fake news, or they may simply be more exposed to it. This article disentangles these competing explanations by examining sharing intentions in a balanced information environment. Using a large national survey of YouGov respondents, we show that Republicans are indeed more prone to sharing ideologically concordant fake news than Democrats, but that this gap is not large enough to explain differences in sharing observed online. Encouragingly, however, we also find that accuracy prompt interventions that reduce the spread of fake news are equally effective across parties, suggesting that fake news sharing among Republicans is not an intractable problem.

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

“…Furthermore, although there were only slight correlations with belief in true ("real") news, people who are more analytic were better at discerning between true and false news ("overall truth discernment"; Figure 7). The association between CRT and news discernment has been replicated in dozens of studies (Bowes & Tasimi, 2022;Brashier et al, 2021;Dias et al, 2020;Guay et al, 2022;Nurse et al, 2021;Pennycook, Bear, et al, 2020;Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2019b;Rosenzweig et al, 2021;Sultan et al, 2022;Tandoc et al, 2021) and has been extended…”

How To Think About Whether Misinformation Interventions Work

“…misinformation warning has no significant effect on additive discernment (p = .58), but has a significant effect on multiplicative discernment (p = .047). Similarly,Guay et al (2022) find that Democrats have higher levels of multiplicative discernment (p = .01) but not additive discernment (p = .07). Similar patterns are evidenced in data fromZedelius et al (2022), which indicate that deprivation curiosity is associated with multiplicative (p = .01) but not additive discernment (p = .72).…”

“…This results in baseline differences in sharing and believing all news across conditions, but not necessarily improved ability to discern between true and false content. Similarly, baseline differences in general belief/sharing of content in general are common when assessing differences in discernment across subgroups in the population, such as political party (e.g., Republicans share more content in general; Guay et al, 2022) and age (e.g., older people share more content in general; Guess et al, 2019).…”

“…Most research on misinformation compares rates of believing or sharing misleading content across groups, whether those groups are randomly assigned-as in an experiment testing the efficacy of an intervention-or not. For instance, studies often compare rates of believing and sharing misleading content across political ideology (Grinberg et al, 2019;Guay et al, 2022), personality traits (Lawson and Kakkar, 2022), and age (Guess et al, 2019).…”

“…Other studies ask respondents to rate a mix of false and true (i.e., accurate) content (e.g., Guess et al, 2020;Lyons et al, 2021;Pennycook et al, 2020. Even among studies that include both false and true content, there is further variation in which outcomes scholars use to measure susceptibility to misinformation, with some focused primarily on how much people believe or share the false content (e.g., Lawson and Kakkar, 2022;Clayton et al, 2020) and others focused on discernment-how much people believe or share the true content relative to the false content (e.g., Guay et al, 2022;Guess et al, 2020;Pennycook et al, 2020. Using different research designs and outcomes can lead to conflicting conclusions about who is most likely to share false claims and which interventions are effective in combating them.…”