Misinformation online has become commonplace. It has fuelled riots and disorder and maybe propelled a few people into office. But is misinformation just a random process, or is it driven by particular actors? Is it seen on both the left and right of politics? Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri sought to answer this in a research paper just published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. They analysed 32 million tweets from parliamentarians in 26 different countries (including the UK, US, Ireland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and Poland) across 6 years. They considered how populist parties were, how left or right-wing, whether in government or opposition, and what broad party family they were in: green (Eco), left, social democratic (SD), liberal (Lib), Christian democratic (CD), conservative (Cons), radical right (RR), agrarian (Agr), ethnic (Eth), or single issue (SI).

Misinformation was not simply associated with being more left or right-wing, or with being more or less populist. Rather, misinformation was associated specifically with populist right-wing parties. You can also see this in the paper’s Figure 2 showing factuality ratings by party family.

Misinformation is a deliberate strategy by the populist right. As the authors write, “The results suggest that current political misinformation is not linked primarily to populism, but specifically to the populist radical right, and points to its particular relationship to an ecosystem of alternative media—largely unrestrained by journalistic integrity and standards. […] As the media ecosystem is shaped by the political logic of radical right populism, so is radical right politics shaped by the incentives of an attention-driven media environment.” That is, the populist right make clickbait that suits social media’s algorithms, and social media clickbait generates outrage that fuels their political mission.

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