The Paradox of Participation Versus Misinformation: Social Media, Political Engagement, and the Spread of Misinformation

Abstract The mechanisms by which users of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter spread misinformation are not well understood. In this study, we argue that the effects of informational uses of social media on political participation are inextricable from its effects on misinformation sharing. That is, political engagement is both a major consequence of using social media for news as well as a key antecedent of sharing misinformation. We test our expectations via a two-wave panel survey of online media users in Chile, a country experiencing information disorders comparable to those of the global North. Analyses of the proposed and alternative causal models with two types of structural equation specifications (fixed effects and autoregressive) support our theoretical model. We close with a discussion on how changes in the way people engage with news and politics – brought about by social media – have produced a new dilemma: how to sustain a citizenry that is enthusiastically politically active, yet not spreading misinformation?

[1]  M. Gentzkow,et al.  Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election , 2017 .

[2]  Steven E. Finkel,et al.  Causal Analysis With Panel Data , 1995, SAGE Research Methods Foundations.

[3]  J. Farkas,et al.  Fake News as a Floating Signifier: Hegemony, Antagonism and the Politics of Falsehood , 2018, Javnost - The Public.

[4]  Chris J Vargo,et al.  The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016 , 2018, New Media Soc..

[5]  J. V. Deth.  A Conceptual Map of Political Participation , 2014 .

[6]  Adam J. Berinsky,et al.  Telling the Truth about Believing the Lies? Evidence for the Limited Prevalence of Expressive Survey Responding , 2018, The Journal of Politics.

[7]  Patricio Navia,et al.  Tuiteo, luego voto. El efecto del consumo de medios de comunicación y uso de redes sociales en la participación electoral en Chile en 2009 y 2013 , 2017 .

[8]  M. Lodge,et al.  The Rationalizing Voter , 2013 .

[9]  Sinan Aral,et al.  The spread of true and false news online , 2018, Science.

[10]  Daniela V. Dimitrova,et al.  The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns , 2014, Commun. Res..

[11]  Brian E. Weeks,et al.  Partisan Provocation: The Role of Partisan News Use and Emotional Responses in Political Information Sharing in Social Media , 2016 .

[12]  Filippo Menczer,et al.  Fact-checking Effect on Viral Hoaxes: A Model of Misinformation Spread in Social Networks , 2015, WWW.

[13]  Brian F. Schaffner,et al.  Misinformation or Expressive Responding? What an Inauguration Crowd Can Tell Us about the source of Political Misinformation in Surveys , 2018 .

[14]  Jihyang Choi,et al.  Why do people use news differently on SNSs? An investigation of the role of motivations, media repertoires, and technology cluster on citizens' news-related activities , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[15]  Karen E. Fisher,et al.  A social diffusion model of misinformation and disinformation for understanding human information behaviour , 2013, Inf. Res..

[16]  M. Schudson,et al.  The Power of News , 1995 .

[17]  Joanne M. Miller,et al.  Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust , 2016 .

[18]  M. Roach,et al.  Increasing Web Survey Response Rates in Innovation Research: An Experimental Study of Static and Dynamic Contact Design Features , 2012 .

[19]  John Gastil,et al.  How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs* , 2014 .

[20]  Rachel R. Mourão,et al.  Fake News as Discursive Integration: An Analysis of Sites That Publish False, Misleading, Hyperpartisan and Sensational Information , 2019, Journalism Studies.

[21]  T. Quandt.  Dark Participation , 2018, Media and Communication.

[22]  Silvio Waisbord,et al.  Truth is What Happens to News , 2018, Journalism Studies.

[23]  Rodney Marshall.  An instrument to measure information competency , 2006 .

[24]  Jan W. van Deth.  A conceptual map of political participation , 2014 .

[25]  A. Shehata,et al.  Learning Political News From Social Media: Network Media Logic and Current Affairs News Learning in a High-Choice Media Environment , 2018 .

[26]  Reid Hastie,et al.  Effects of Amount of Information on Judgment Accuracy and Confidence , 2008 .

[27]  Peter Goldschmidt,et al.  Models of information search: a comparative analysis , 2013, Inf. Res..

[28]  C. Frith.  Social cognition , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[29]  N. Newman,et al.  Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019 , 2019 .

[30]  Emily A. Thorson,et al.  Introduction: Misinformation among Mass Audiences as a Focus for Inquiry , 2018, Misinformation and Mass Audiences.

[31]  William P. Eveland,et al.  Information and Expression in a Digital Age , 2005, Commun. Res..

[32]  Z. Kunda,et al.  The case for motivated reasoning. , 1990, Psychological bulletin.

[33]  Robert LaRose,et al.  Completion rates and non-response error in online surveys: Comparing sweepstakes and pre-paid cash incentives in studies of online behavior , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[34]  Barbara Poblete,et al.  Twitter under crisis: can we trust what we RT? , 2010, SOMA '10.

[35]  Homero Gil de Zúñiga,et al.  Social Media Use for News and Individuals' Social Capital, Civic Engagement and Political Participation , 2012, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[36]  R. Rich,et al.  Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship , 2000, The Journal of Politics.

[37]  Jay D. Hmielowski,et al.  Clicking vs. sharing: The relationship between online news behaviors and political knowledge , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[38]  Friedrich W. Hesse,et al.  Audience design in Twitter: Retweeting behavior between informational value and followers' interests , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[39]  Miriam J. Metzger,et al.  The science of fake news , 2018, Science.

[40]  Rasmus Kleis Nielsen,et al.  "News you don't believe": Audience perspectives on fake news , 2017 .

[41]  Steven H. Chaffee,et al.  Mass Communication and Political Socialization , 1970 .

[42]  Debbie Goh,et al.  Social media and citizen engagement: A meta-analytic review , 2016, New Media Soc..

[43]  Edson C. Tandoc,et al.  Defining “Fake News” , 2018 .

[44]  C. Hofstetter,et al.  Information, Misinformation, and Political Participation , 2006 .

[45]  N. Nie,et al.  PSR volume 66 issue 3 Cover and Front matter , 1972, American Political Science Review.

[46]  Mark Aakhus,et al.  Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance , 2002 .

[47]  J. Krosnick,et al.  Survey research. , 1999, Annual review of psychology.

[48]  Jörg Matthes,et al.  The social media political participation model: A goal systems theory perspective , 2020 .

[49]  Shelley Boulianne,et al.  Revolution in the making? Social media effects across the globe , 2017 .

[50]  S. Lewis,et al.  A Decade of Research on Social Media and Journalism: Assumptions, Blind Spots, and a Way Forward , 2018, Media and Communication.

[51]  Peter Neijens,et al.  Measuring Media Exposure in a Changing Communications Environment , 2016 .

[52]  J. Katz,et al.  Media use and antimicrobial resistance misinformation and misuse: Survey evidence of information channels and fatalism in augmenting a global health threat , 2018 .

[53]  Margaret E. Roberts,et al.  From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media And Democracy , 2017 .

[54]  S. Keeter,et al.  What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters , 1996 .

[55]  S. Valenzuela,et al.  Behavioral Effects of Framing on Social Media Users: How Conflict, Economic, Human Interest, and Morality Frames Drive News Sharing , 2017 .

[56]  Brian E. Weeks.  Emotions, Partisanship, and Misperceptions: How Anger and Anxiety Moderate the Effect of Partisan Bias on Susceptibility to Political Misinformation , 2015 .

[57]  L. Bode.  Political News in the News Feed: Learning Politics from Social Media , 2016 .

[58]  Andrew Gelman,et al.  Struggles with survey weighting and regression modeling , 2007, 0710.5005.

[59]  Yannis Theocharis,et al.  The continuous expansion of citizen participation: a new taxonomy ‡ , 2016, European Political Science Review.

[60]  S. Valenzuela.  Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior , 2013 .

[61]  D. Lazer,et al.  Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election , 2019, Science.

[62]  Jessica T. Feezell.  Predicting Online Political Participation , 2016 .

[63]  Monideepa Tarafdar,et al.  From "information" to "knowing": Exploring the role of social media in contemporary news consumption , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[64]  Diana C. Mutz.  The Consequences of Cross-Cutting Networks for Political Participation , 2002 .

[65]  Dhavan V. Shah,et al.  Explicating Opinion Leadership: Nonpolitical Dispositions, Information Consumption, and Civic Participation , 2006 .

[66]  Thomas E. Ruggiero.  Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century , 2000 .

[67]  Emily K. Vraga,et al.  In Related News, That Was Wrong: The Correction of Misinformation Through Related Stories Functionality in Social Media , 2015 .

[68]  H. G. D. Zúñiga,et al.  Social Media, Political Expression, and Political Participation: Panel Analysis of Lagged and Concurrent Relationships , 2014 .

[69]  A. Hayes.  Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach , 2013 .

[70]  J. Druckman,et al.  The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics , 2017 .

[71]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Social Cognition, from Brains to Culture , 1984 .

[72]  Jonathan Bright.  The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing Diverge , 2016 .

[73]  Vasja Vehovar,et al.  Web Survey Methodology , 2015 .

[74]  Charles K. Atkin,et al.  Mass Communication and Political Socialization: Specifying the Effects , 1986 .

[75]  N. Nie,et al.  Participation in America : Political Democracy and Social Equality , 1972 .

[76]  Andrew K. Przybylski,et al.  Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[77]  R. Kelly Garrett,et al.  Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs: How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions , 2016, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[78]  Mats Ekström,et al.  Social media, porous boundaries, and the development of online political engagement among young citizens , 2018, New Media Soc..

[79]  J. Hochschild,et al.  Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics , 2015 .