Crisis, Country, and Party Lines: Politicians' Misinformation Behavior and Public Engagement

2025-02-21

AI Summary

This study investigates how political ideology, national institutional contexts, and governance tiers shape politicians’ dissemination of misinformation and its public engagement during crises (e.g., COVID-19). Leveraging 400,000+ tweets posted by 3,277 politicians across Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US on X (formerly Twitter) from 2020–2021, we construct the first cross-national, multi-level (national/regional executive and legislative) dataset on political misinformation behavior. We integrate multilingual fact-checking with hierarchical regression models to conduct comparative analysis. Key contributions include: (1) empirical confirmation that crises significantly amplify both misinformation diffusion and user engagement; (2) identification of Italy (4.9%) and the US (2.2%) as having the highest misinformation-sharing rates among sampled countries; and (3) novel evidence that US misinformation elicits 2.5× more engagement than verified content, while crisis-related misinformation in Italy substantially outperforms general misinformation in both reach and engagement intensity.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion

Abstract

Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the misinformation-sharing behavior of 3,277 politicians and associated public engagement by using data from X (formerly Twitter) during 2020-2021. The analysis was grounded in a novel and comprehensive dataset including over 400,000 tweets covering multiple levels of governance-national executive, national legislative, and regional executive-in Germany, Italy, the UK, and the USA, representing distinct clusters of misinformation resilience. Striking cross-country differences in misinformation-sharing behavior and public engagement were observed. Politicians in Italy (4.9%) and the USA (2.2%) exhibited the highest rates of misinformation sharing, primarily among far-right and conservative legislators. Public engagement with misinformation also varied significantly. In the USA, misinformation attracted over 2.5 times the engagement of reliable information. In Italy, engagement levels were similar across content types. Italy is unique in crisis-related misinformation, particularly regarding COVID-19, which surpassed general misinformation in both prevalence and audience engagement. These insights underscore the critical roles of political affiliation, governance level, and crisis contexts in shaping the dynamics of misinformation. The study expands the literature by providing a cross-national, multi-level perspective, shedding light on how political actors influence the proliferation of misinformation during crisis.

Problem

• Politicians' misinformation behavior
• Public engagement with misinformation
• Cross-country differences in misinformation

Innovation

• Twitter data analysis
• Cross-national misinformation study
• Crisis-related misinformation focus