427/2019 Kirill Pogorelskiy and Matthew Shum

More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behaviour underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favourable to their candidates more often than unfavourable signals; 2) they naively take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.

Political Economy