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      When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries

      1 , 2
      The International Journal of Press/Politics
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6 years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.

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          Most cited references56

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          The spread of true and false news online

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            The Populist Zeitgeist

            Cas Mudde (2004)
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              The spreading of misinformation online.

              The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15--where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., "echo chambers." Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades' size.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
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                Journal
                The International Journal of Press/Politics
                The International Journal of Press/Politics
                SAGE Publications
                1940-1612
                1940-1620
                January 13 2025
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
                [2 ]Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
                Article
                10.1177/19401612241311886
                152c9682-0b52-4f96-8dd9-b67a71826969
                © 2025

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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