Job Market Paper

Curating Political Information: Who Shares What with Whom?

Draft

Political information reaches people through others who share it. In four experiments with U.S. and German adults and professional journalists, I study what governs people's decisions to share information. Senders favor facts aligned with their own political positions, even with prior knowledge held fixed and although they rate the facts as credible. Provision rises with a fact's alignment and with the factual correction and persuasion senders expect it to produce, and falls with the political distance between sender and receiver. When receivers are randomly assigned to make a real political donation, senders appear to select more on the facts they expect to move receivers toward the senders' own political positions, with no detectable change in selection on the expected factual correction. Professional journalists exhibit similar alignment-based selection with competition, ownership and audience demand removed. Receivers whose sender withheld a fact hold substantially less accurate beliefs than receivers shown it. Receivers underestimate how often senders disclose and perceive little of how disclosure depends on the fact. Importantly, selection among true facts distorts information supply without any falsehood, a margin that current policy interventions, such as fact-checking, do not target.