Believe It or Not: An Empirical Study on Political Fake News Sharing

In this paper, after an introduction (§ 1) we present the two main alternative approaches to the acceptance and spread of fake news (§2) and we focus on the problem of distinguishing between believing and sharing fake news (§3). This problem becomes one of the main topics of our empirical study described in §§ 4 and 5. In particular, we explore the ability to recognize the truth of the news published on social networks and the relationship between accuracy and the willingness to share news. An original aspect of our research is the use of a particular version of the trust game, a methodology developed in the environment of behavioral economics. With this methodology, we aim to better verify the actual dispositions of the subject to share and accept news on social networks. In the discussion of the experiment (§6), results suggest that accuracy (ability to distinguish true from false news) is not the only factor in sharing but is flanked by factors linked to the affirmation of one’s identity. Besides, data on sharing suggest that people tend to mitigate polarization by favoring inclusiveness and less polarized news.