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 paper investigates how U.S. elected officials share misinformation and low-credibility content online, arguing that this behavior is not uniform but conditioned by two structural factors: the institutional roles officials occupy and their ideological positions. The authors frame certain political contexts as “checks” that can either constrain or enable the diffusion of dubious information by politicians. Published in Political Communication, the work contributes to the study of elite-driven misinformation, emphasizing that officeholders are consequential actors in shaping the online information environment and that features of institutional design and partisanship bear on democratic accountability in digital ecosystems.
Key Contributions
- Advances scholarship on elite-driven political misinformation by identifying the institutional and ideological conditions that constrain or amplify its diffusion.
- Reframes misinformation sharing as context-dependent rather than a flat individual trait, tying it to institutional position and ideological orientation.
- Contributes to political communication research on how officeholders shape the online information environment and on the accountability implications of institutional design.
Methods
- Empirical analysis of the online sharing behavior of elected officials, focused specifically on misinformation and low-credibility content.
- Comparative design across institutional roles and ideological positions to isolate the factors that moderate misinformation-sharing behavior.
Findings
- Officials’ propensity to share misinformation is systematically shaped by institutional and ideological context rather than being uniform across politicians.
- Certain institutional positions and ideological orientations function as checks that moderate (constrain or enable) misinformation sharing.
- (Precise magnitudes and directional effects are not recoverable from the abstract-level summary alone.)
Connections
This study sits within a cluster of work on elite and partisan drivers of online misinformation; it complements research on how politicians and elite cues shape low-credibility content circulation such as Mosleh2024-op and Pierri2025-hm. Its concern with ideological asymmetry and partisan information environments links to broader accountability and platform-exposure debates in Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq and Bakshy2015-rn.