Does the Content of News Affect the Spread of Political (Mis)information?

• In Event: The Diffusion of Misinformation

Abstract

Over the past several decades, the growth of cable television and the internet has created a competitive media marketplace. To attract viewers, many of whom are not interested in politics, television broadcasters and media firms have tailored their news offerings to appeal to broader audiences, resulting in an increased supply of “clickbait" headlines, negative news coverage and entertainment-oriented soft news content (Baum 2011; Munger et al. 2020; Soroka and Krupnikov 2021). These media trends raise the risk of negatively valenced and character focused content being exploited to spread hyperpartisan and false information on social media. Despite an important literature on news consumption and misinformation, our understanding of how the content of political news impacts the spread of true and false information online remains limited. Although political news content can be categorized in numerous ways, in this paper I focus on two dimensions: (1) the positive or negative tone of partisan news, and (2) whether the news content focuses on a politicians' character or policy positions. Thus, I seek to answer the following question: How does the partisan tone and focus of political news affect individuals' likelihood of sharing (mis)information?

First, I test whether people are more or less likely to share real and false information that positively portrays their partisan in-group rather than information that negatively portrays their partisan out-group. Theories of affective polarization and out-group animosity suggest that Americans increasingly dislike and distrust members of the opposing party (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012; Mason, 2018). Although the conventional wisdom is that people are more drawn to negative news content (Soroka, Fournier and Nir, 2019; Robertson et al., 2023), whether affective polarization is driven by out-group hate or in-group affinity remains a subject of ongoing debate. Thus, it is unclear whether citizens prefer to share political headlines on social media that positively depict their preferred party or news that is harmful towards their partisan out-group.

Second, I examine whether individuals react differently to true and false information depending on the focus of the news, specifically, the extent to which the news pertains to policy issues or relates to the character and personality of politicians. Previous research has shown that individuals find soft news more engaging (Rozell, 1994), as its content is “typically more sensational, more personality-centered, less time-bound, more practical, and more incident-based than other news” (Patterson, 2001, 4). However, when it comes to sharing misinformation, McPhetres, Rand and Pennycook (2021) find that both Republicans and Democrats tend to voice a greater intention of sharing news with policy implications than news that deprecates the character of politicians.

To test whether the partisan tone and the focus of news headlines affect the spread of misinformation, I combine data from 16 studies measuring individuals’ likelihood of sharing political headlines on social media. These studies offer a unique advantage due to their similar experimental design. In each study, participants are presented with a variety of news headlines and subsequently asked to rate their likelihood of sharing the given headline on social media. This allows me to assess the impact of two variables on individuals' propensity to share political news headlines: 1) whether the headline has a positive tone towards the in-group or a negative tone towards the out-group, and 2) whether the focus of the news is centered on policy issues or the character of politicians. My analyses consist of a series of hierarchical models, which allow me to account for heterogeneity of the effects across studies, in addition to the fact that individuals rate multiple news headlines.

Contrary to the widely held belief in journalism that “if it bleeds, it leads”, my initial findings shine a more positive light on people's engagement with political news on social media. More specifically, contrary to conventional wisdom and the prevailing narrative in existing research, members of the public do not seem to uniformly favor negative character-driven content on social media. In fact, individuals seem inclined to disseminate accurate political content that affirms their identities without derogating the out-party or deprecating politicians' character. Thus, from a practical standpoint, digital media outlets in the U.S. may benefit from publishing more positive and policy-oriented content on social media to increase engagement. Methodologically, my results also suggest the importance for scholars to be mindful of the partisan tone and focus of political news when studying misinformation, particularly when it comes to constructing stimulus sets for headline-level studies.

Author

• Gabrielle Peloquin-Skulski, Massachusetts Institute of Technology