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Abstract
The use of social media for sharing political information is generating increasing public concern. We address the debate using unique data and a new theoretical framework. We theorize that low-quality news potentially provides a fertile context for misinformation and the resources for disinformation. But in the UK a key source of such news is the mainstream tabloids, whose stock-in-trade has always been sensationalism and political bias. Integrating four datasets we constructed during the 2017 UK election campaign—individual-level data on news sharing (N=1,525,748 tweets), website data (N=17,989 web domains), news article data (N=641 articles), and data from a custom survey of Twitter users (N=1,313 respondents)—we find that sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically-dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation behaviors. We explicate the consequences of this finding for the civic culture of social media and the direction of future scholarship on “fake news.”
Keywords
news, news sharing, misinformation, disinformation, tabloid news, social media, fake news