Abstract

When do users share fact-checks with their peers? We describe a survey experiment (N = 2,041) conducted during the 2019 presidential election in Argentina measuring the propensity of voters to share corrections to political misinformation that randomly confirm or challenge their initial beliefs. In line with processes of motivated reasoning, we find evidence of selective sharing—the notion that individuals prefer to share pro-attitudinal rather than counter-attitudinal fact-checks. This directional effect, however, is regulated by the type of adjudication made by the fact-checking organization, such that sharing increases for attitude-consistent validations (i.e., ‘true’ ratings) but decreases for attitude-consistent refutations (i.e., ‘false’ ratings). Experimental results are partially confirmed with a regression discontinuity analysis of observational data of Twitter shares collected during a televised debate of the same election. Our findings suggest that fact-checking organizations could selectively increase exposure to their verifications on social media by validating correct information (e.g., ‘It is true that vaccines prevent COVID-19’) or reduce exposure to them by refuting incorrect claims (e.g., ‘It is false that vaccines do not prevent COVID’).