The rise of fake news has led to growing concern about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns particularly in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections. This study uses an original survey to link individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 US presidential campaign on Facebook.
Highlights:
- The survey found that it was rare behaviour on social media for users to share false articles. The vast majority of users in their data did not share any articles from fake news sites in 2016 at all. While 26.1% of respondents shared 10 to 100 links during the data collection period, the sharing of fake stories was a much rarer event than sharing links at all.
- According to their measure of fake news, only 8.5% of the respondents shared at least one such fake news article among their friends. Out of these, a majority were Republicans who shared such stories.
- Upon further exploration, it was found that self-described independents on average shared roughly as many false articles as Republicans. However, conservatives identified as "very conservative", were found to share the most number of false articles.
- It was found false that those who share more content as more likely to share false news. This data was found to be consistent with the hypothesis that people who share many links are more able to distinguish between fake news and real news.
- A notable finding from the survey is the clear association between age group and the average number of fake news articles shared on Facebook. Those over 65 shared an overage of 0.75 fake news articles which is double the average number of articles shared by the second-oldest group. Older Americans were more likely to share articles from fake news domains. However, more research is needed to better understand and contextualise the interaction of age and online political content.