Misinformation and Polarization in a High-Choice Media Environment: How Effective Are Political Fact-Checkers?

Media and Political Polarization

This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly centrist news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly moderate, evidence points to some pol...

How Compatible are Public Choice and Austrian Political Economy?

Public Choice relies heavily on equilibrium analysis in its models of government failure. Austrians are suspicious of equilibrium analysis owing to its reliance on some variant of the perfect-knowledge assumption. To what extent then can Austrians consistently embrace public-choice descriptions of government failure? This paper argues that to maintain methodological consistency Public Choice sh...

Memory for Fact , Fiction , and Misinformation

Media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War frequently contained corrections and retractions of earlier information. For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made. Similarly, tentative initial reports about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction were all later disconfirmed. We investigated the eff...

Network segregation in a model of misinformation and fact checking

Misinformation under the form of rumor, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories spreads on social media at alarming rates. One hypothesis is that, since social media are shaped by homophily, belief in misinformation may be more likely to thrive on those social circles that are segregated from the rest of the network. One possible antidote is fact checking which, in some cases, is known to stop rumors f...

Why Are "Others" So Polarized? Perceived Political Polarization and Media Use in 10 Countries