News We Like to Share: How News Sharing on Social Networks Influences Voting Outcomes

Kirill Pogorelskiy and Matthew Shum
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Matthew Shum: Caltech

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding : 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals ; 2) they naıvely take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.

Keywords: news sharing; social networks; voting; media bias; fake news; polarization; filter bubble; lab experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 C92 D72 D83 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-ict, nep-net, nep-pol, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:1199

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