Abstract

Nowadays, it is hard to venture online without coming across a heated discussion over “Fake News”; as a result, people are finding hardE times moving through an entirely new distorted era of misinfor-mation and biased news. In this paper, we investigate the effect of fake news on people’s opinion polarization on a hot topic – such as immigration – through an experiment. We show that “Backfire Effect” and a cognitive bias we named “Validation Myopia” occur when people read Fake news in-dependently if they believe them or not. In addition, we show how Fake news affect opinion polariza-tion and we provide evidence that the Backfire Effect has a higher magnitude than its counterpart (i.e. validation myopia). Finally we show that the emotion-driven effect of fake news can be neutralized thanks to ex-ante signaling of the inaccuracy of fake news.

Keywords: fake news, opinion polarization, immigration, backfire effect, validation myopia, post-truth.

JEL Classification: C90.

Cite as: Borella, C. A. (2017). Fake News, Immigration, and Opinion Polarization. SocioEconomic Challenges, 1(4), 59-72. DOI: 10.21272sec.1(4).59-72.2017

References

1. Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake news in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-236.
2. Baron, J. (1995). Myside bias in thinking about abortion. Thinking & Reasoning, 1(3), 221-235.
3. Baron, J. (2012). Thinking and deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Brundidge, J. (2010). Encountering “Difference” in the Contemporary Public Sphere: The Contribution of the Internet to the Heterogeneity of Political Discussion Networks. Journal of Communication, 60(4), 680-700.
5. Colleoni, E., Rozza, A. and Arvidsson, A. (2014). Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 317-332.
6. Iyengar, S. and Hahn, K. (2009). Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 19-39.
7. Kim, Y., Hsu, S. and de Zúñiga, H. (2013). Influence of Social Media Use on Discussion Network Heterogeneity and Civic Engagement: The Moderating Role of Personality Traits. Journal of Communication, 63(3), 498-516.
8. Lyons, P. A., Kenworthy, J. B., & Popan, J. R. (2010). Ingroup identification and group-level narcissism as predictors of U.S. citizens’ attitudes and behavior toward Arab immigrants. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(9), 1267-1280.
9. Nilsson, J. (2017). Ben Franklin Used Fake News.
10. Siebörger, R. (2017). Fake News, Alternative Facts, History Education. Public History Weekly, 8.
11. Soll, J. (2016). The Long and Brutal History of Fake News.
12. Stanford History Education Group (2015). Evaluation Information: The Cornerstone of Civil Online Reasoning.