Why do people share political information and misinformation online? Developing a Bottom-Up descriptive framework
Open accessAbstract
Social media users are key actors in the spreading of misleading or incorrect information. To develop an integrative parsimonious summary of social media users’ own accounts of motives for sharing political information, we conducted: (1) a literature review of motives for personally sharing false information as reported by social media users and (2) qualitative research concerning these motives using an innovative, ecologically valid method. Based on our findings, we developed a pool of items evaluating social media users’ motives for sharing false political information, which we then tested and analyzed the dimensionality of in (3) a pre-registered questionnaire-based study to identify key clusters of users’ own accounts of motives for sharing both true and false political information. The current findings show that there are distinct sets of motives people report for their misinformation sharing behavior: prosocial activism, attack or manipulation of others, entertainment, awareness, political self-expression, and fighting false information. Also, these sets of motives are associated with variables known to predict sharing misinformation, and some of these sets predict social media users’ self-reports of having shared misinformation in the past. Our findings highlight and elaborate on users’ motives that reflect a concern with “making things better” and acting in a manner that is beneficial to society as a whole, and suggest that different interventions may be required to combat misinformation sharing driven by different motives. A potential set of 18 items that could be used in questionnaires measuring motivations for sharing political news online is described.
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Affect-driven content can override cognitive vigilance.
“These mechanisms illustrate how affect-driven content can override cognitive vigilance, aligning with recent work on emotional misinformation (Goldstein et al., 2024; Perach et al., 2023).”
From The illusion of reality: How AI-generated images (AIGIs) are fooling social media users (2026) · cites this paper as Perach et al., 2023
The Results (p. 5) identify negative emotions as one reported motive for sharing political information and misinformation. But the paper does not show that affect-driven content overrides cognitive vigilance; its Applied Directions (p. 13) discuss deliberate processing and accuracy-focused interventions without making that claim. (LLM, conf=0.78)
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- Authors
- Perach, R., Joyner, L., Husbands, D., & Buchanan, T.
- Affiliations
- University of Westminster (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Perach, Rotem
- Venue
- Social Media + Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2023-07
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 2056-3051 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4385989962
- Cited by
- 19
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 9
- FWCI
- 8.20
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Social Media + Society (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- WestminsterResearch (University of Westminster) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2021-163)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Keywords
- misinformation sharing, social media users, entertainment, questionnaire development, misinformation interventions
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