Elected officials’ online sharing of misinformation: Institutional and ideological checks

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.