Official yet questionable: examining misinformation in U.S. state legislators’ tweets

ABSTRACTWe study the roles of elected officials in the dissemination of misinformation on Twitter. This is a particularly salient online population since elected officials serve as primary sources of information for many stakeholders in the public, media, government, and industry. We analyze the content of tweets posted from the accounts of over 3,000 U.S. state lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. Specifically, we identify the dissemination of URLs linked to unreliable content. Our starkest finding is that Republicans share more misinformation than do Democrats by an order of magnitude. Additionally, we uncover distinct patterns in the temporal trends of tweets and tweets associated with misinformation across party and state lines. Delving into the content of tweets referencing unreliable URLs reveals discussions of election integrity, abortion, COVID-19 policies, and immigration. Furthermore, consistent with the literature on asymmetric polarization, Republicans exhibit a greater inclination toward engaging in partisan attacks. We also find that state lawmakers often tweet about state-specific topics. These findings enhance our understanding of misinformation, political communication, and state politics.KEYWORDS: Misinformationtwitterstate legislatorpolitical communication Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Unlike Facebook accounts, we cannot distinguish between legislators’ official accounts and campaign accounts based on their account verification.2. Among unreliable tweets, 13,420 (99.84%) have ideological labels, and only 22 unknown bias URLs get a weight of 1.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Science Foundation [2148215].Notes on contributorsYuehong Cassandra TaiYuehong Cassandra Tai is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Social Data Analytics, Penn State University. Her research spans public opinion, public policy, political communication, and Chinese politics, using Bayesian measurement models, text analysis, and machine learning methods.Roan BumaRoan Buma is a researcher at the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He received a Research Master’s degree in the Social Sciences (cum laude) and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science (cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include public opinion, political communication, and communication through digital media. Currently, he is part of a cross-national research project analysing the economic and cultural roots of populism; a collaboration of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, La Sapienza University of Rome, University of Birmingham, Universität Münster, and Exeter University (precede.eu).Bruce A. DesmaraisBruce A. Desmarais is the DeGrandis-McCourtney Early Career Professor in Political Science, Director of the Center for Social Data Analytics, and co-hire in the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research is focused on methodological development and applications, focused primarily on network analysis and machine learning, that advance our understanding of the complex interdependence that underlies politics, policymaking, and public administration.