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

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between partisanship, echo chambers, and vulnerability to online mis-information 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 be-tween a user’s partisanship and their position within a partisan echo chamber, these types of influ-ence are confounded. To disentangle their effects, we performed a regression analysis and found that vulnerability to misinformation is most strongly influenced by partisanship for both left- and right-leaning users.