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Researchers have counted how often this happens. S. Shyam Sundar of Pennsylvania State University and Eugene Cho Snyder of the New Jersey Institute of Technology presented a study on it. Mengqi Liao of the University of Georgia and other researchers were also part of the team. The work appeared in 2025 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour and analyzed more than 35 million public Facebook posts. Around 75 percent of shared news links were passed along without users ever clicking on the article first. Extreme and politically agreeable content was especially likely to travel unread. Among 2,969 links rated as false, conservative users accounted for 76.94 percent of the sharing, liberals for 14.25 percent. A large share of those false reports came from conservative sources, the authors stress. That is how you get a political public where the headline wins before anybody has read the first sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which side feeds off this system has been measured. Jingyuan Yu and Emese Domahidi of Ilmenau University of Technology studied it. They worked with Duccio Gamannossi degl\u2019Innocenti of the University of Padua and Fabiana Zollo of Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Their 2026 study covers more than 400,000 posts from 3,277 politicians. They came from Germany and Italy, along with the United Kingdom and the United States. In Germany, 8.2 percent of links shared by AfD politicians led to misinformation. For the Left Party, it was 0.2 percent, for CDU\/CSU 0.1 percent. Republican politicians in the United States came in at 4.6 percent, Democrats at 1.0 percent. The highest figures were found among far-right and conservative lawmakers in countries with intense political polarization. An opinion about right-wing communication would be easy to argue with. These numbers were counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Link to the NBC article: How Mark Zuckerberg Shifted Meta to the Right<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mohsen Mosleh and Qi Yang reached the same finding in a large analysis published in Nature. Tauhid Zaman and Gordon Pennycook were also involved. David Rand and other researchers were part of the team as well. They first analyzed around 9,000 politically active Twitter users around the 2020 U.S. election. Then they tested the result against 7 additional datasets from a total of 16 countries. The data came from Twitter and Facebook, along with survey experiments. Conservative or Republican-leaning users consistently shared significantly more links to often low-quality news sources than liberal or Democratic-leaning users. Alongside experts, politically balanced groups of ordinary people also rated the quality of the sources. As a test, even groups made up entirely of Republican laypeople evaluated them. The gap remained. For the platforms themselves, that is still pretty hard to explain away. The authors caution against treating these users as representative of the entire population, but sharing Democratic reports, or reports warning about what is happening, has ended up down in the basement. Reading them, sure. Much more than that, usually not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n