It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how much of our lives now unfold online, especially when it comes to something as crucial as news? We’re all sharing things, liking things, commenting, but do we ever really stop to think about why we’re doing it, particularly with political news? This is a question that’s been bugging a lot of people, especially since the rise of misinformation. We’re trying to figure out what makes people hit that “share” button for political content on social media, and how those motivations might be messing with our ability to have healthy conversations and a well-informed public online. If we can get a better handle on what people are hoping to achieve when they share news – whether it’s to genuinely inform, or perhaps to stir the pot – then democracies can start to think about how to tackle the really damaging stuff that circulates online.
This whole puzzle is what Professor Andrew Chadwick and Dr. Cristian Vaccari decided to dig into, specifically looking at Britain. Their report is a pioneering effort, the first of its kind, actually, to really probe the news-sharing habits of everyday Brits on social media. They asked some really direct questions. For instance, how many people are actually sharing false or misleading political news? Is there this “anything goes” attitude where people just don’t care if what they share is true or not? And remember how everyone used to talk about the “wisdom of crowds” online – the idea that a community would naturally correct errors? They wanted to know if that’s actually happening on social media in Britain, or if it’s just a hopeful pipe dream. To answer these crucial questions, they teamed up with Opinium Research, who generously provided their survey services for free. Between July 5th and 16th, 2018, 2,005 people from all walks of life across the UK, chosen to accurately represent the population, completed their questionnaire.
What they found is pretty eye-opening and, honestly, a bit unsettling. More than half of all British social media users – a whopping 57.7% – admitted that in the past month, they’d encountered news on social media that just didn’t feel entirely accurate. Even more concerning, nearly 43% of those who share news confessed to sharing inaccurate or false information themselves. And here’s the kicker: 17.3% of news sharers actually admitted to sharing news they knew was made up at the time they shared it! Who are these people? Well, they tend to be younger, male, and more interested in politics. You’d hope that when false news is shared, others would step in to correct it, but the reality is a bit more grim. Fewer people (33.8%) reported being corrected than those who admitted to sharing false news (42.8%). Almost a quarter (26.4%) of those who shared inaccurate or made-up news simply went unchallenged. Now, you could try to look on the bright side and say that almost three-quarters of people who shared exaggerated or made-up news were reprimanded, but the most problematic sharing often doesn’t get called out. Only a small fraction, 8.5% of British social media users, actually bothered to reprimand someone for sharing news that was completely fabricated.
So, why are people sharing political news online? The researchers discovered that the main drivers are noble enough: people want to inform others and express their feelings. But then there’s a darker side, what they call “civically-ambivalent motivations.” For example, nearly one in five news sharers (18.7%) actually admitted that upsetting others was an important motivation when they shared news. That’s a significant chunk of people actively trying to provoke! And it turns out, political leaning plays a role. Conservative supporters and those with right-wing beliefs were more likely to share inaccurate news, and interestingly, they were also more likely to be called out for it. On the flip side, Labour supporters and those on the left were more likely to spot inaccurate news and take the initiative to correct others. Overall, about a third of British social media users are sharing news at least once a month. These active sharers tend to be similar to the most politically engaged people in society: male, with higher education, and a strong interest in politics, though younger folks are more likely to share news than older ones.
This whole endeavor comes from the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C), which was set up in 2018 at Loughborough University. Their mission is pretty vital: to use social science and information science to really understand how social media is shaping our civic culture. Led by Professor Andrew Chadwick, they bring together experts from all sorts of fields – communication, information science, social psychology, sociology – to tackle big issues like misinformation, disinformation, and the disturbing rise of hate speech and intolerance online. They’re all about creating evidence-based knowledge to fix the parts of social media that are undermining democracy, and at the same time, highlighting and promoting the good things social media can do for civic engagement. It’s a huge undertaking, but one that’s absolutely essential in our increasingly digital world. This report, though based on 2018 data, provides a crucial early snapshot into the messy, complicated, and often bewildering world of political news sharing on social media.