Partisanship and selective political news seeking, verification and sharing on social media

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The unprecedented spread of political misinformation on social media poses a serious threat to democracy, whose effective functioning depends on a well-informed citizenry. One way to identify the mechanisms behind such practices is to study political news engagement of social media users. This study examines whether political partisanship (partisan strength) shapes political news behaviors among digitally mediated and politically polarized citizens in Pakistan. Using a repeated-measures survey, 762 partisan social media users in Pakistan reported their likelihood of seeking, verifying and sharing across attitude-consistent, attitude-inconsistent and attitude-neutral political news. The findings indicate that participants reported a greater likelihood of seeking, verifying and sharing attitude-consistent political news than attitude-inconsistent and attitude-neutral news, and strong partisans in a more pronounced way, while the overall tendency to verify political news remained generally low. These self-report political news behaviors are interpreted as being consistent with theoretical expectations derived from the confirmation bias research, which suggests that partisans selectively engage with political information that aligns with their preexisting political beliefs. The findings have implications for understanding the behavioral processes that may contribute to misinformation in digitally mediated political environments.