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Low-quality news links draw higher engagement, no matter the political slant online
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-quality-news-links-higher-engagement.htmlTom Fleischman, Cornell University
Average political lean is negatively associated with average news quality of news shared across platforms. (A) Comparison of average quality with average political lean of news across platforms. (B) Stacked histogram showing the distribution of political lean of news shared across platforms, with each platform normalized to one to facilitate cross-platform comparison. (C) Stacked histogram showing the distribution of news quality for each platform, with each platform normalized to one to facilitate cross-platform comparison. All figures include all rated domains shared in January 2024. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425739122
The spread of dubious headlines on social media isn't just a right-wing thing—it's a social media thing, according to new research from Cornell.
After studying millions of social media posts containing links to news stories on a variety of platforms, the team found that news shared on platforms with more conservative user bases is, on average, lower in quality. When it comes to likes and shares, they found that news aligning with the dominant political slant of a platform got more engagement—but that on both conservative- and liberal-leaning platforms, a user's posts with lower-quality news links got more engagement than their higher-quality news posts.
"If your post is in line with the norm on the platform, people engage with it more," said David Rand, professor of information science, marketing and management communication, and psychology in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
"It's like an 'echo platform' scenario," he said. "Many had argued that people on the right were better at getting engagement on social media, but we find that it totally depends on the platform. When it comes to the advantage of lower-quality news, on the other hand, it's happening on both sides."
. . .
After studying millions of social media posts containing links to news stories on a variety of platforms, the team found that news shared on platforms with more conservative user bases is, on average, lower in quality. When it comes to likes and shares, they found that news aligning with the dominant political slant of a platform got more engagement—but that on both conservative- and liberal-leaning platforms, a user's posts with lower-quality news links got more engagement than their higher-quality news posts.
"If your post is in line with the norm on the platform, people engage with it more," said David Rand, professor of information science, marketing and management communication, and psychology in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
"It's like an 'echo platform' scenario," he said. "Many had argued that people on the right were better at getting engagement on social media, but we find that it totally depends on the platform. When it comes to the advantage of lower-quality news, on the other hand, it's happening on both sides."
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" Bullsh*t and Mediocrity take solid leads as we enter the third turn .. ! "
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