Uninformed and Misinformed: Advancing a Theoretical Model for Social Media News Use and Political Knowledge

Abstract

Scholarship has now recognized the potentially detrimental effects of social media on political knowledge. At the same time, a separate but similar line of work has raised concerns that these platforms are the primary vector of political misinformation. Despite the renewed focus on misinformation studies, the question as to whether political knowledge and susceptibility to misinformation are related remains open. If they are indeed related, we still know little about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive political learning when people rely on social media for news. Based on a two-wave panel survey collected during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we found that social media news use fosters the news-finds-me perception (particularly among those who feel overwhelmed with the volume of information available on social media). This, in turn, leads people to be both uninformed and misinformed about politics and current affairs. Implications for democracy are discussed.

KEYWORDs:

• Social media
• political knowledge
• misinformation beliefs
• news-finds-me perception
• information overload
• panel survey data
• computational methods
• 2020 U.S. Presidential election

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Wardle (2017) differentiates between misinformation and disinformation, in that the former refers to falsehoods generated unintentionally, while the latter refers to falsehoods generated with the intention to mislead others. In this study, we use the term misinformation as a general term to refer to online falsehoods, given the challenge in ascertaining intentionality behind the creation and spread of falsehoods online.

2 We originally had eight knowledge items in W1 and nine in W2 (the full items can be found in the appendix section). But to address a concern that some knowledge items can be translated into misinformation batteries, we excluded the items with true and false statements. The patterns were the same for the “revised measure” (adopted in this paper) and the “original measure” (the full knowledge items)

3 Like factual political knowledge measure, for W2 stories, respondents were only asked about the stories that occurred between W1 and W2.

4 We selected control variables based on the political knowledge/misinformation scholarship.