ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In recent years, social media has become increasingly fragmented, as platforms evolve and new alternatives emerge. Yet most research studies a single platform-typically X/Twitter, or occasionally Facebook-leaving little known about the broader social media landscape. Here, we shed light on patterns of cross-platform variation in the high-stakes context of news sharing. We examine the relationship between user engagement and news domains' political orientation and quality across seven platforms: X/Twitter, BlueSky, TruthSocial, Gab, GETTR, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. Using an exhaustive sample, we analyze all (over 10 million) posts containing links to news domains shared on these platforms during January 2024. We find that news shared on platforms with more conservative user bases is significantly lower quality on average. Turning to engagement, we find-contrary to hypotheses of a consistent "right-wing advantage" on social media-that the relationship between political lean and engagement is strongly heterogeneous across platforms. Conservative news posts receive more engagement on platforms where most content is conservative, and vice versa for liberal news posts, consistent with an "echo platform" perspective. In contrast, the relationship between news quality and engagement is strikingly consistent: Across all platforms examined, a given user's lower-quality news posts received higher average engagement, even though higher-quality news is substantially more prevalent and garners far more total engagement across posts. This pattern holds when accounting for poster-level variation and is observed even in the absence of ranking algorithms, suggesting that user preferences-not algorithmic bias-may underlie the underperformance of higher-quality news.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.