. Furthermore, our results add to the growing body of literature documenting—at least at this historical moment—the link between extreme right-wing ideology and misinformation8,14,24 (although, of course, factors other than ideology are also associated with misinformation sharing, such as polarization25 and inattention17,37).
Misinformation exposure and extreme right-wing ideology appear associated in this report. Others find that it is partisanship that predicts susceptibility.
. We also find evidence of “falsehood echo chambers”, where users that are more often exposed to misinformation are more likely to follow a similar set of accounts and share from a similar set of domains. These results are interesting in the context of evidence that political echo chambers are not prevalent, as typically imagined
We found that users who followed elites who made more false or inaccurate statements themselves shared news from lower-quality news outlets (as judged by both fact-checkers and politically-balanced crowds of laypeople), used more toxic language, and expressed more moral outrage.
Elite mis and disinformation sharers have a negative effect on followers.
Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by professional fact-checkers21, (b) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by layperson crowds21, and (c) estimated political ideology, based on the ideology of the accounts they follow10. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin.
Lee, Elizabeth C., Nikolas I. Wada, M. Kate Grabowski, Emily S. Gurley, and Justin Lessler. ‘The Engines of SARS-CoV-2 Spread’. Science 370, no. 6515 (23 October 2020): 406–7. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd8755.