Less informed and misinformed citizens? A panel study of how and why social media influence learning about political news

For decades, the mass media have provided the public with opportunities to keep themselves up-to-date about politics and current affairs, and earlier studies have established the link between news consumption and level of political knowledge (e.g. Barabas & Jerit 2009). In large-scale democracies, citizens need media to inform them about political alternatives and implemented policies (e.g. Carpini & Keeter 1996). In this paper, we pursue the recent worry that an increasingly important news source in today’s media environment, social media is less effective in informing citizens about politics and current affairs (Bode 2016; Shehata & Strömbäck 2021). We make two main contributions to the literature. First, based on the extensive literature on political knowledge, and the OMA framework (Luskin 1990), we develop an analytical framework that specifies factors that potentially help explain any negative effects of social media news consumption. We suggest that the quality of (social media) networks (opportunity), interests (motivation), cognitive capacity (ability), will modify and/or moderate the negative effect of social media news consumption on learning about politics and current affairs. Second, if citizens are confident about being informed about issues, but indeed are not, they are misinformed, and this is arguably even more serious than being little informed (Kuklinski 2000). Hence, our second endeavor is to investigate to what extent social media news consumption result in citizens being misinformed. We test the propositions empirically by using panel survey data from Norway (September 2020, 3285 respondents; November 2020, 3009 respondents). The panel survey included comprehensive items on news consumption, social media network characteristics, extensive items to measure cognitive capacity, and extensive knowledge items about the content of news reported between the two panel rounds to measure learning. Preliminary results indicate that social media news consumption is negatively related to learning about news, but do not lead to misinformed citizens. Social media news consumers are not confident in their wrong beliefs. The negative effects are related to motivations and ability, but these factors far from mediate the whole relationship. The quality of networks moderate the relationship, social media news consumers with quality networks do not learn less. In conclusion we discuss the democratic implications of the results. References Barabas, J., Jerit, J. (2009) Estimating the Causal Effects of Media Coverage on Policy-Specific Knowledge. American Journal of Political Science 53(1):73–89. Bode, L. (2016) Political News in the News Feed: Learning Politics from Social Media. Mass Communication and Society 19:24–48. Carpini, M. X., Keeter, S. (1996) What Americans Know about Politics and Why it Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kuklinski, J. H ; Quirk, P. J ; Jerit, J.; Schwieder, D.; Rich, R. (2000) Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship. The Journal of politics. 62 (3): 790-816. Luskin, R. C. (1990). Explaining political sophistication. Political Behavior, 12(4), 331-361. Shehata, Adam, Strömbäck, Jesper. (2021) Learning Political News From Social Media: Network Media Logic and Current Affairs News Learning in a High-Choice Media Environment. Communication Research.