Republican members of the U.S. Congress are more likely to get news from questionable sources than their European counterparts, according to a study.
Republican congress members are sharing more links to websites classified as "untrustworthy" according to research published in PNAS.
Politician's use of social media can affect public perception and views. With the U.S. midterm elections coming up in November, the findings are relevant.
The amount of unreliable information politicians share on social media is increasing, according to the first author. We analyzed millions of originaltweets by politicians from the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, so we could prove this.
A team of researchers collected more than 3.4 million social media posts from politicians over the course of two years. 1.7 million of these were from members of the U.S. congress. In order to assess the credibility and transparency of news websites against nine journalistic criteria and identify relevant details about the website's ownership, funding, credibility and transparency practices, a database was created by NewsGuard.
Over the years, members of the Republican Party shared more links to websites that were classified as "untrustworthy". Over the past two years, the number of links to unreliable websites has increased.
According to Dr. Lasser, members of the right half of the political spectrum share more of these links with Republicans. The share is stable in other countries.
From 2.4% to 5.5% the percentage of links posted by Republicans went up.
Overall, Republican members of Congress post about nine times as many links as Democratic members of Congress, for whom only 0.4% of the links are found to be unreliable.
European parliamentarians are less likely to link to bad websites. The links shared by politicians from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria were not trustworthy. The Alternative for Germany, a right-win political party, used the same source for their posts as the Republicans.
The results were very similar when the analysis was repeated. It is important to use different assessments of the credibility of news sources in order to exclude bias.
"Politicians are part of the educated elite and their behavior is a kind of compass of what is socially acceptable and what is not," said Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol. I think it's a problem when people in politics post misinformation from sources that aren't very reliable.
It is important to question the sources of information shared by politicians despite their high social standing.
More information: Social media sharing of low quality news sources by political elites, PNAS Nexus (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.06313 Journal information: PNAS Nexus
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