Job Market Paper

Curating Political Information: Who Shares What with Whom?

Draft available upon request

Political information is selected before it reaches an audience. In four experiments with US and German adults and professional journalists, I study how people allocate political facts. Controlling for prior knowledge and perceived fact credibility, senders favor facts aligned with their own political positions. Eliciting expected effect reveals that while provision depends on the fact’s alignment, its ability to correct beliefs, and to persuade, it also falls sharply with political distance between the sender and receiver. Randomly making receivers’ beliefs politically consequential shifts selection toward facts senders expect to move receivers toward their own political positions, but does not change selection based on expected factual correction or political distance. Absent market incentives, professional journalists exhibit similar alignment-based allocation patterns and respond strongly to opportunities to persuade receivers. I find that receivers perceive little of the curation faced and withholding is associated with substantially lower belief accuracy. Importantly, curation distorts information supply even without falsehoods and is therefore not targeted by current interventions such as fact-checking and content labeling.