Partisans neither expect nor receive reputational rewards for sharing falsehoods over truth online

Contributions

• Empirically tests whether reputational concerns drive people to preferentially share false over true partisan-favorable news.
• Provides direct evidence of reputational benefits both anticipated by survey participants and actually received on Twitter for sharing different content.
• Demonstrates that perceived accuracy is valued in reputational calculations even for politically favorable headlines.
• Shows that social approval on Twitter favors true over false headlines, contradicting the reputational-motivation hypothesis.

Method

Three preregistered survey studies presented participants with news headlines varying in veracity (true/false) and political favorability (favorable to their preferred party/unfavorable). Participants rated:

• Perceived accuracy (9-point scale in Study 1; 6-point in Studies 2–3)
• Political favorability to their party
• Anticipated reputational gain from sharing (how positively they would be viewed by their social network)

The studies controlled for headline familiarity, importance, emotional valence (funny, surprising, positive, negative), partisan signaling, and expected engagement. A separate Twitter analysis examined the actual approval (measured by logged likes-per-retweet ratio) that 335 headlines received on the platform, coded for their partisan lean using the authors' survey ratings and ideology inference via network analysis.

Results

Survey findings: Across all three studies, participants anticipated significantly greater reputational benefits from sharing accurate headlines (S1: b = 0.694; S2: b = 0.665; S3: b = 0.821; all p < 0.001). While political favorability also predicted anticipated reputational gain, the perceived reputation value of accuracy did not diminish for more favorable headlines—in fact, a positive interaction showed that accuracy was valued more highly for favorable headlines (S1: b = 0.087; S2: b = 0.139; S3: b = 0.095; all p < 0.001). Among high fake-news sharers (21% of sample), the same patterns held.

Twitter findings: True headlines elicited significantly more approval (measured by logged likes-per-retweet) than false headlines (b = 0.075, p = 0.019). This association held even for politically favorable content and showed no interaction with favorability, meaning true favorable headlines were not penalized in approval relative to false favorable headlines.

The results held after controlling for headline characteristics (importance, familiarity, engagement, sensationalism, informative value, surprise, impact) and after examining secondary measures like partisan-leaning subsamples.

Notes

This work is notable for directly testing a long-theorized mechanism (reputational rewards for partisan sharing) with high statistical power and ecological validity via Twitter analysis. The finding that reputational value of accuracy does not attenuate even for favorable headlines suggests that factors other than reputation—such as limited ability to discern false from true information, or inattention to accuracy—may better explain partisan misinformation sharing. The paper casts doubt on the hypothesis that people strategically choose to share falsehoods for social gain, which has significant implications for intervention design.