Elected officials’ Online Sharing of Misinformation: Institutional and Ideological Checks

Elected officials occupy privileged positions in public communication about important topics – roles that extend to the digital world. In the same way that public officials stand to lead constructive online dialogue, they also hold the potential to accelerate the dissemination of harmful content. We explore and explain the sharing of misinformation, which we refer to as low-factual content, by examining nearly 500,000 Facebook posts by U.S. state legislators from 2020 to 2021. We validate a widely used low-factual content detection approach in misinformation studies and apply the measure to all of the posts we collect. Our findings reveal that the prevalence is rare, affecting less than 1% of legislators’ posts overall. However, Republican legislators share low-factual content at higher rates, and certain states emerge as hotspots for such content. We also find that conservative lawmakers are more likely to share such content, with this tendency potentially intensifying in conservative districts, and waning in liberal ones. Legislative professionalism plays a significant role in misinformation circulation: legislators with higher institutional capacity and resources tend to be less inclined to share low-factual information. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future interventions to reduce the spread of low-factual content.