Motivations to affiliate with audiences drive partisan sharing of (mis)information on social media

Abstract

Social media platforms have been accused of facilitating the spread of partisan and false news in ways that may foster polarization. Prior research has argued that individuals are motivated to selectively share partisan, hostile and even false news, if they promote their political convictions and identity. Here, we argue that partisan selective sharing is reinforced by relational motivations to affiliate with and manage connections with politically like-minded audiences. Using two large online survey experiments (Study 1: N=1735 and Study 2: N=1637), and a large study of actual news sharing behavior on Twitter (Study 3: N=1308), we show that sharing of politically congruent news is driven by assumptions about the political stance of the audience. Partisan social media users selectively share political news, whether true or false, based on anticipation of positive reactions from like-minded audiences and refrain from sharing in the face of politically dissimilar audiences. These findings suggest that online “echo chambers” trigger relational motives that further the sharing of partisan content and potentially misinformation.