Fig. 1 Distribution of total and fake news shares. (Left) Histogram of the total number of links to articles on the web shared by respondents in the sample who identified as Democrats, Republicans, or independents. (Right) Stacked histogram of the number of fake news articles shared by respondents who identified as Democrats, Republicans, or independents using the measure derived from (7).
Fig. 2 Average number of fake news shares (and 95% CIs) using the list of domains derived from (7). (A) Party identification, (B) age group, (C) ideological self-placement, and (D) overall number of Facebook wall posts. Proportions adjusted to account for sample-matching weights derived from the third wave of the SMaPP YouGov panel survey.
- Table 1 Distribution of fake news shares.
0 1 2 3 4 5–10 11–50 1090 (91.5%) 63 (5.3%) 12 (1.0%) 8 (<1.0%) 5 (<1.0%) 9 (<1.0%) 4 (<1.0%) - Table 2 Determinants of fake news sharing on Facebook.
Quasi-Poisson models with YouGov’s sample-matching weights applied. Dependent variables are counts of fake news articles shared using measures derived from (7) (columns 1 and 2) and (2) (columns 3 and 4). The reference category for ideology is “Not sure.” “Number of links shared” refers to the number of Facebook posts by each respondent that includes a link to an external URL. A&G, Allcott and Gentzkow.
Number of stories shared Number of stories shared (A&G) (1) (2) (3) (4) Very liberal 0.487 0.387 1.634* 1.485* (1.238) (1.209) (0.876) (0.800) Liberal −1.127 −1.141 0.873 0.812 (1.439) (1.404) (0.886) (0.809) Moderate 0.333 0.392 0.748 0.824 (1.186) (1.157) (0.875) (0.799) Conservative 2.187* 2.248** 1.736** 1.800** (1.155) (1.128) (0.868) (0.794) Very conservative 2.366** 2.297** 2.231** 2.087*** (1.158) (1.132) (0.869) (0.795) Age: 30–44 0.772 0.742 0.253 0.172 (0.811) (0.791) (0.390) (0.356) Age: 45–65 1.136 1.079 0.602* 0.488 (0.765) (0.746) (0.359) (0.328) Age: over 65 2.052*** 1.900** 1.389*** 1.152*** (0.766) (0.750) (0.362) (0.333) Female −0.114 0.008 −0.329** −0.199 (0.217) (0.219) (0.155) (0.146) Black −0.880 −0.806 −0.609 −0.536 (0.754) (0.736) (0.400) (0.366) Education −0.085 −0.091 −0.021 −0.021 (0.081) (0.081) (0.055) (0.052) Income −0.007 −0.007 0.003 0.003 (0.008) (0.008) (0.004) (0.003) Number of links shared 0.001*** 0.001*** (0.0002) (0.0001) Constant −3.416** −3.635*** −1.201 −1.502* (1.379) (1.348) (0.931) (0.851) N 1041 1040 1041 1040 *P < 0.1
**P < 0.05
***P < 0.01.
- Table 3 Comparison of samples.
FB, Facebook.
Full sample Sample 2* Sample 3† P‡ Sample 4§ % Democrat 31 32 40 0.17 40 Mean ideology (five-point) 2.98 2.89 2.76 0.01 2.75 % Vote intention (Clinton) 36 37 47 0.07 47 % Voted in 2016 general 0.59 0.59 0.63 0.01 0.63 % Knowledge (0–2) 2.05 2.04 2.13 0.03 2.13 Mean age 51 49 49 0.16 49 % High school or less 23 20 22 0.17 22 Self-reported % Post to FB several times/day 26 28 0.28 28 % Look at FB often 65 67 0.42 68 N 3500 2711 1331 1191 *Column 2 summarizes characteristics of respondents who said in the survey that they have a Facebook account (i.e., they selected “Facebook” from the list of response options to the question “Do you have accounts on any of the following social media sites?”).
†Column 3 subsets to respondents (regardless of their answer in the previous question) who consented to share Facebook profile information with the researchers.
‡P values are computed from t tests of the difference in means between the sample of respondents who reported having a Facebook account and those who consented to provide access to their profile data.
§The final column subsets to those who shared any Facebook data at all that we were able to link back to the survey.
Supplementary Materials
Supplementary material for this article is available at http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/5/1/eaau4586/DC1
Tables S1–S13. Determinants of fake news sharing on Facebook (alternate specification).
Table S14. Determinants of hard news sharing on Facebook.
Fig. S1. Average number of fake news articles shared by age group (with 95% confidence intervals), using the URL-level measure derived from (2).
Additional Files
Supplementary Materials
This PDF file includes:
- Tables S1–S13. Determinants of fake news sharing on Facebook (alternate specification).
- Table S14. Determinants of hard news sharing on Facebook.
- Fig. S1. Average number of fake news articles shared by age group (with 95% confidence intervals), using the URL-level measure derived from (2).
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