Communication Theories

Theory can help provide answers about why people share fake news.  Festinger (1957) defined cognitive dissonance as the psychological state in which our beliefs contradict our attitudes or actions.  To restore balance, we need our beliefs and attitudes to be consistent.  One way to achieve that is through confirmation bias, the “tendency to give more weight to information that confirms one of our preexisting beliefs” (McIntyre, 2018, p. 173).  Bovet and Makse (2019) attributed the sharing of fake news to confirmation bias.  Users are more likely to share, like, or comment on stories that affirm their beliefs.  Ashley et al. (2018) affirmed the role of confirmation bias in allowing falsehoods to flourish.  They noted that users “may have shared the stories without reading them or failed to fact-check them because of this tendency to believe information with which they agreed.  They wanted the stories to be true and so behaved as if they were” (p. 152).  Another study called this action congruency, concluding that political affinity drove the sharing of fake news sources (Grinberg et al., 2019).

Ashley et al. (2018) also mentioned two-step flow theory, which suggests that information, particularly political ideas, flows from mass media to community opinion leaders and on to members of the public.  Because social media sites are set up to allow users to share or retweet material from the sources they follow, fake news can spread quickly. 

Jamieson (2018) agreed with the role two-step theory played in the 2016 election.  However, she also noted another theory that she believed bolstered her claim that the Kremlin helped elect Donald Trump.  In particular, she stressed the role of agenda-setting theory, which suggested that the media help shape the political narrative (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).  Jamieson argued that because Russian trolls succeeded in getting pro-Trump themes to trend on Twitter, journalists would consider those trending topics more newsworthy and set the news agenda accordingly.  For example, less than an hour after the infamous Access Hollywood tape of Trump having a lewd conversation about women emerged, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta.  Journalists began covering these revelations with equal weight to the Access Hollywood tape to appear politically objective.  Jamieson argued that this effort at equal time created a false equivalence between the stolen emails and Trump bragging about sexual assault.

Another component of agenda-setting involves framing, in which the media focuses on certain angles and “tells audiences how to think about issues” (as cited in Jamieson, 2018, p. 44).  Russian trolls had worked overtime to paint Clinton as disingenuous and corrupt.  By making the WikiLeaks content more salient, the media helped underscore the belief that Clinton had something to hide, furthering perceptions that she was scandal-plagued and dishonest.  This decision gave another political advantage to Trump.