These ﬁndings should come as no surprise to those familiar with the well-
developed literature on partisan bias, which can be traced back to at least The
American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960) and explores the extent to which
“perceptual screens” color individuals’ beliefs about objective facts such as
the state of the economy (Achen and Bartels 2017). Today, such phenomena
tend to be examined within the framework of motivated reasoning, which views
partisan gaps in attitudes and factual beliefs as a function of protective
mechanisms such as conﬁrmation bias and selective avoidance (Taber and
Lodge 2006; Flynn, Nyhan, and Reiﬂer 2017). What distinguishes much of
the later research on misinformation is its focus on misperceptions in factual
beliefs and their effect on opinion – rather than the effects of partisan or other
commitments on factual beliefs.
Social_Media_and_Democracy