2023/08/21 by Antoine Marie, Michael Bang Petersen · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Social Media and Politics #Climate Change Communication and Perception
paper · pdf · doi:10.31219/osf.io/nmg9h
Social media have been accused of facilitating the spread of partisan and false news in ways that may foster ideological and affective polarization. Prior research has shown that individuals are motivated to selectively share partisan (mis)information if it promotes their political convictions or identity. Here, we argue that such ‘partisan sharing’ is, in part, driven by social motivations to please and affiliate with politically like-minded audiences. Using a study of actual news sharing behavior on Twitter (Study 1: N=1308) and two online survey experiments (Study 2: N=1735; Study 3: N=1637), we show that sharing of politically congruent news stories is influenced by perceptions about the political stance of the audience. Partisan social media users selectively share political news (true or false), based on anticipation of positive reactions from like-minded audiences, and refrain from sharing to avoid upsetting politically dissimilar audiences. This suggests that the formation of “echo chambers” may trigger relational motives that further the sharing of partisan (mis)information.