Biased into posting: interactions with social media network political posts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract

The 2016 U.S. presidential election saw social media continue to play an important role in citizens’ political engagement. This study examines the effect of seeing social media political post sharing on individuals’ own political post sharing. Results from a two-wave survey suggest the interplay within the network is important. Seeing others share political posts and perceiving posts were biased towards a candidate predicted sharing political posts.

Keywords:

• Bias
• Elections
• Political Participation
• Social Media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bivariate correlations between national, conservative and liberal news as three separate variables all exceeded .77, indicating a strong relationship. In addition, principal components factors analysis with promax rotation indicated one factor. Therefore, the study chose to combine these news items into one variable.