Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online misinformation by studying news sharing behavior on Twitter. While our results confirm prior findings that online misinformation sharing is strongly correlated with right-leaning partisanship, we also uncover a similar, though weaker trend among left-leaning users. Because of the correlation between a user's partisanship and their position within a partisan echo chamber, these types of influence are confounded. To disentangle their effects, we perform a regression analysis and find that vulnerability to misinformation is most strongly influenced by partisanship for both left- and right-leaning users.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Neutral bots probe political bias on social media
• Can crowdsourcing rescue the social marketplace of ideas?
• Quantifying the Vulnerabilities of the Online Public Square to Adversarial Manipulation Tactics
• Fine-Grained Prediction of Political Leaning on Social Media with Unsupervised Deep Learning
• Friction Interventions to Curb the Spread of Misinformation on Social Media
• An ontological analysis of misinformation in online social networks