FAKE NEWS AND NEWS SEEKING BEHAVIOUR: DOES PARTISANSHIP LEAD TO SELECTIVE EXPOSURE?

Abstract

A well-functioning democracy demands a well-informed populace, yet, today, both are threatened by the widespread presence of fake news on social media. Combating the menace of fake news requires finding out the potential antecedents of the spread of fake news. One of such possible factors is the audiences’ online news consumption patterns. The individuals who adopt biased news seeking behaviour in their engagement with the political content on social media, under the influence of their partisanship—selective exposure—are highly vulnerable to fake news. In this study, an attempt is made to examine the relationship between partisanship and news seeking behaviour of followers of different Pakistani political parties on social media. In an online survey experiment, 762 followers of six major political parties in Islamabad and Punjab reported their likelihood of seeking attitude-consistent, attitude-inconsistent and attitude-neutral political news on social media on a Likert scale. The findings indicated that individuals exhibited partisan or selective news seeking behaviour showing preference to the content that matched their political viewpoints which was explained by the selective exposure theory. It elucidates that the individuals selectively seek or expose to information that is aligned with their pre-existing beliefs or narratives and in this case the political information on social media. This selective exposure to political news has serious implications for the spread of fake news such as the partisans tend to not only consume fake news but also believe and share them on social media especially that match their political outlook even when they are flagged as disputed by the fact-checkers.