The Influences of Personality and Motivation on the Sharing of Misinformation on Social Media

Social media, featuring rich user-generated information, is becoming an important component of daily life. It has also become a fertile ground for misinformation (inaccurate information) due to lack of quality control mechanisms. This study proposed and directly tested three predictor categories – personality, motivation, and perceived characteristic of information – to understand users’ misinformation sharing on social media. A survey was conducted with 171 university students. The findings showed that userintrinsic factors and three motivation factors played influential roles in the sharing behavior. We thus concluded that people’s sharing of misinformation on social media is mainly influenced by their personalities or specific motivations. The action of sharing, rather than the perceived accuracy and characteristics of the information being shared, is what matters most. In light of the findings, besides teaching information evaluating skills, professionals responsible for information literacy training may also want to address the non-informational motivations that propel misinformation sharing.