糖心TV

Title: Media Bias and News Sharing on Social Networks: A Laboratory Study

Abstract: In this paper we use lab experiments to study the relationship between social media and voting in elections. Our treatments mimic the features of social networks (obtaining information from friends) in the presence of media bias (obtaining information from biased media outlets) in order to address concerns in both the academic and popular press literatures that voters obtaining their political news and information from social media outlets may become more polarized in their voting behavior. Our preliminary results suggest substantial effects of polarization at the expense of efficient information aggregation by voting: in all treatments voters publicly send out signals favorable to their party more often than signals unfavorable to their party, and also vote according to their private signals more often if the signal is favorable. Media bias lowers efficiency, and its negative effects are amplified when voters only exchange information with other voters with the same party preferences (our polarized social media treatment). All in all, our results provide tentative support to concerns that by filtering out unfavorable content social media may lead to polarization in voting behaviour.