Trust in my Fake News, Scepticism about yours: Experimental Evidence on how Ideological Congruence and Echo Chambers alter Beliefs in Fake News

Growing evidence suggests the existence of fake news is problematic (Sunstein, 2009; Lazer et.al, 2018), polarizing (Osmundsen et. al., 2021) and erodes democracy (Lance & Livingston, 2018). However, not all fake news is the same, the level of scepticism with which one reads a post from a political opponent is higher than the one used for an ally, and this effects our beliefs about the credibility of the information. Using a pre-registered online experiment (N=690), we test the impact of ideological congruence on the likelihood of correctly identifying fake news. The findings suggest that people are more likely to correctly identify fake news when it relates to their political opposition, relative to when it is ideologically congruent, and that the magnitude of this effect is stronger for people that take part in echo chambers. These resutls suggets that echo chamber memebrship increase social identity effects on social media and exacerbates the problem in contemporary politics.