Your Fake News, Our Facts

Abstract

In making sense of experience and choosing a course of action, identities matter. People are more likely to accept and share messages that fit the way they make sense of themselves and their world. Messages that fit are more likely to stick and are less likely to be counterargued. One way to create this “fit” is to frame persuasion attempts in culturally fluent terms and yoke a call to action to the social categories people experience as ‘true’ and ‘natural.’ This two-step process (setting a culturally fluent frame and linking action to identity) shifts people from information-based to identity-based processing. Once this occurs, identities shape which facts matter, how much information is enough, how carefully information is scrutinized, and how much people accept, believe, and share rather than reject, disbelieve, and counterargue messages regarding these facts and information. We outline how this works, arguing that by combining cultural fluency and identities, disinformation may be more efficient than information or misinformation in rallying people to action and that corrective “undoing” attempts must address this culture-identity framing.