Elite & Mass Political Behavior

False political narratives are nearly inescapable on social media in the United States. They are a particularly acute problem for Latinos, and especially for those who rely on Spanish-language social media for news and information. Studies have shown that Latinos are vulnerable to misinformation because they rely more heavily on social media and messaging platforms than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, fact-checking algorithms are not as robust in Spanish as they are in English, and social media platforms put far more effort into combating misinformation on English-language media than Spanish-language media, which compounds the likelihood of being exposed to misinformation. As a result, we expect that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media to be more likely to believe in false political narratives when compared with Latinos who primarily rely on English-language social media for news. To test this expectation, we fielded the largest online survey to date of social media usage and belief in political misinformation of Latinos. Our study, fielded in the months leading up to and following the 2022 midterm elections, examines a variety of false political narratives that were circulating in both Spanish and English on social media. We find that social media reliance for news predicts one’s belief in false political stories, and that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media have a higher probability of believing in false political narratives, compared with Latinos using English-language social media.

This article examines the information sharing behavior of U.S. politicians and the mass public by mapping the ideological sharing space of political news on social media. As data, we use the near-universal currency of online information exchange: web links. We introduce a methodological approach and software to unify the measurement of ideology across social media platforms by using sharing data to jointly estimate the ideology of news media organizations, politicians, and the mass public. Empirically, we show that (1) politicians who share ideologically polarized content share, by far, the most political news and commentary and (2) that the less competitive elections are, the more likely politicians are to share polarized information. These results demonstrate that news and commentary shared by politicians come from a highly unrepresentative set of ideologically extreme legislators and that decreases in election pressures (e.g., by gerrymandering) may encourage polarized sharing behavior.