Research Finds Conservatives Vastly More Likely to Share Inaccurate Articles Without Even Reading Them

Everyone is pretty bad at reading, though.

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A team of researchers led by Penn State have found that American conservatives on Facebook are substantially more likely to share article links containing false information — without even reading them. 

Liberals aren’t off the hook, though; Facebook users overall were astonishingly bad at vetting information before spreading it online. 

“The closer the political alignment of the content to the user — both liberal and conservative — the more it was shared without clicks,” study author and media effects researcher S. Shyam Sundar said in a Penn State writeup of the research. “They are simply forwarding things that seem on the surface to agree with their political ideology, not realizing that they may sometimes be sharing false information.”

Reading Rainbow 

Sundar and his team’s study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, is an alarming indication about how dismal media literacy — and due to the time period it focused on, the past may be prelude to Donald Trump’s upcoming second presidency.

Why? The group’s research looked at 35 million public Facebook posts shared between 2017 and 2020, the bounds of Trump’s first presidency. 

In total, about 75 percent of users, regardless of political stance, shared links without clicking on them first. Behavior sharply divided along political lines, though, with conservatives making up about 77 percent of those shares, compared to just 14 percent of liberals.

It’s easy to imagine why. Trump often crusades against the media, repeating many times that reporters should be jailed for breaking news, or assaulted in jail until they give up their sources. 

Trump’s favorite frenemy, Elon Musk, likewise enjoys expressing his disbelief in factual reporting on X-formerly-Twitter, posting many times to his 205 million followers that the press “[lies] relentlessly,” and shouldn’t be trusted. 

“Disinformation or misinformation campaigns aim to sow the seeds of doubt or dissent in a democracy — the scope of these efforts came to light in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” Sundar said in Penn State’s blurb. 

But Sundar wasn’t prepared to discover how these powerful disinformation campaigns could be. 

“It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75 percent of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first,” he said. “That was a surprising, very scary finding.”

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