Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect

Philipp Denter, Martin Dumav and Boris Ginzburg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We propose a model of political persuasion in which a biased newspaper aims to convince voters to vote for the government. Each voter receives the newspaper's report, as well as an independent private signal. Voters then exchange this information on social media and form posterior beliefs, neglecting correlation among signals. An increase in connectivity increases the newspaper's bias if voters are ex ante predisposed to vote against the government, and reduces the bias if they are predisposed in favour of the government. While more precise independent signals reduce the newspaper's optimal bias, the bias remains positive even when connectivity becomes large. Thus, even with a large number of social connections, the election produces an inefficient outcome with positive probability, implying a failure of the Condorcet jury theorem.

Keywords: social media; media bias; correlation neglect; Bayesian persuasion; voting; deliberation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-net and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:97626

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