Fake News, Immigration, and Opinion Polarization

Abstract

Nowadays, it is hard to venture online without coming across a heated discussion over "Fake News"; as a result, people are finding hardE times moving through an entirely new distorted era of misinformation and biased news. In this paper, we investigate the effect of fake news on people's opinion polarization on a hot topic-such as immigration-through an experiment. We show that "Backfire Effect" and a cognitive bias we named "Validation Myopia" occur when people read Fake news independently if they believe them or not. In addition, we show how Fake news affect opinion polarization and we provide evidence that the Backfire Effect has a higher magnitude than its counterpart (i.e. validation myopia). Finally we show that the emotion-driven effect of fake news can be neutralized thanks to ex-ante signaling of the inaccuracy of fake news.