Tai, Y. C., Lin, Y., & Desmarais, B. A. (2026). Elected officials’ online sharing of misinformation: Institutional and ideological checks. Political Communication, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2026.2613661
Summary
This study investigates how institutional roles and ideological positions condition the online sharing of misinformation by U.S. elected officials. Rather than treating elite misinformation diffusion as a uniform partisan phenomenon, the authors ask whether features of the political context — the office a politician holds and where they sit ideologically — function as systematic checks that constrain or enable the circulation of low-credibility content. Published in Political Communication, the paper argues that elite-driven misinformation is patterned: institutional and ideological structures meaningfully moderate which officeholders amplify dubious information on social media.
Key Contributions
- Reframes elite misinformation sharing as conditional on institutional and ideological context, rather than as a flat partisan trait.
- Identifies specific structural “checks” — institutional position and ideological placement — that shape officeholders’ contribution to the online information environment.
- Extends political communication scholarship on elite cues into the domain of low-credibility content diffusion by elected representatives.
Methods
Empirical analysis of elected officials’ online behavior, measuring sharing of misinformation or low-credibility sources. The design compares behavior across institutional roles (e.g., differing offices or chambers) and across ideological positions to isolate moderating factors that predict misinformation-sharing propensity.
Findings
- Institutional and ideological context systematically structure misinformation sharing among elected officials.
- Certain institutional roles appear to operate as constraints on misinformation diffusion, while others enable it.
- Ideological position interacts with institutional setting to shape officeholders’ likelihood of amplifying low-credibility content.
Connections
This paper sits alongside other elite-focused studies of political misinformation diffusion, particularly DeVerna2025-dl on politician-driven low-credibility sharing and Mosleh2024-op on elite-level misinformation patterns on social platforms. It also complements platform-level evidence from Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq and Bakshy2015-rn on how partisan asymmetries in exposure and sharing emerge, and connects to broader debates on partisan information ecosystems represented by Budak2024-ef and Green2025-ap.