Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Wilf Family Department of Politics and Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, New York University, 19 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012, USA.
Sci Adv. 2019 Jan 9;5(1):eaau4586. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aau4586. eCollection 2019 Jan.
So-called "fake news" has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents' sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.
所谓的“假新闻”再次引发了人们对政治运动中错误信息普遍存在和影响的担忧。鉴于这种材料可能广泛传播，我们研究了与分享 2016 年美国总统竞选期间虚假文章相关的个人特征。为此，我们将原始调查与受访者在 Facebook 个人资料数据中记录的分享活动进行了独特的关联。首先，我们发现分享这些内容是一种相对较少见的活动。保守派比自由派或温和派更有可能分享来自假新闻网站的文章，而这些网站在 2016 年主要倾向于支持特朗普。我们还发现了一个强烈的年龄效应，即使在控制党派和意识形态之后，这种效应仍然存在：平均而言，65 岁以上的用户分享假新闻网站文章的次数是最年轻年龄组的近七倍。
