Why do people share ideologically extreme, false, and misleading content on social media? A self-report and trace data–based analysis of countermedia content dissemination on Facebook and Twitter

The study investigates how individual factors like ideological extremity, social trust, and trust in news media relate to the sharing of countermedia content—web-based information that is ideologically extreme and often misleading. By analyzing self-report survey data and social media trace data from Facebook and Twitter, the study discovers that sharing such content is positively associated with ideological extremity and negatively associated with trust in mainstream media on Facebook, while on Twitter, it is negatively associated with social trust.