Rejecting the Mainstream: Differentiation of Conservative Cognitive Authority, Political Partisanship, and the Rise of Fake News

• In Event: 3483 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 06. Political Participation, Race, and Right-Wing Conservatism

Abstract

The advent of social media has raised concerns in recent years about how this new kind of information sharing is affecting the consumption of political news. These concerns have been reflected in academic scholarship on phenomena such as “echo chambers” and “fake news” that both validates and tempers these anxieties. But little research to date has leveraged insights from this work, arguably the most important one being that increasing partisanship and the consumption of dubious content are largely relegated to conservative consumers, to examine these phenomena as the result of a broader information ecology that is result of decades of conservative social movement activity. Such an approach, I argue, would suggest that these aforementioned qualities of conservative news consumption online are at least partly due to the development of more highly differentiated conservative knowledge authorities compared to their liberal counterparts who have maintained trust in mainstream science and media. I explain the theoretical motivation for a study that fills this gap and introduce data well suited for this task. Analysis will be conducted in the next several months and I hope to share results at the 2018 Annual ASA Meeting.

Author

• Marcus Mann, Duke University