Political Polarization and Blatant Lies on Social Media

Abstract

We propose a possible link between the political polarization among citizens and the level of shamelessness of lies issued by politicians on social media websites. To this purpose, we study the problem of a candidate who has (exogenously) decided to issue a lie on social media and that must decide how blatantly the lie should be. We assume the candidate's payoff function increases with the dissemination of the lie up to the election date. The dissemination of the lie up to the election date is shown to be a decreasing function of the shamelessness level. Nonetheless, the electorate's political polarization is an incentive for the candidate to lie brazenly. The dissemination process is carried by social media users who decide between inspecting (or not) and sharing (or not) the candidate's message. Furthermore, we include programmed bots as sources of dissemination. In this regard, we show how the influence of bots over the dissemination process relates to the electorate's political polarization level, with the lie's shamelessness and with the time interval between the posting and election dates.