Multi-Platform Referrers of Misinformation: A Comparative Analysis of Misinformation Visits Referred by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok

Journalistic and scholarly accounts alike often depict social media platforms as key players in exposing people to misinformation. Unfortunately, existing research examining social media’s role in exposing people to misinformation online implicitly operates under what we call the direct referrer paradigm, focusing only on visits to misinformation that directly follow social media. We introduce the embedded referrer paradigm, which considers social media’s more comprehensive role in leading people to visit misinformation throughout their online journeys and operationalize it via counterfactual simulations. We estimate the effects of social media in exposing people to misinformation websites under both paradigms using 3 months of a large sample of Americans’ (N = 1,240) web browsing behavior (21 million website visits). We explore seven different platforms’ (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube) effects in exposing people to misinformation sites with various ideological leanings. Overall, our results suggest that analyses under the direct referrer paradigm underestimate the role of social media in exposing people to misinformation, with estimated effects under the embedded referrer paradigm ranging from 1.5 to 15+ times larger than effects under the direct referrer paradigm. The difference in estimated effects under both paradigms is generally consistent across platforms, misinformation types (liberal, conservative, non-ideological), and individuals’ partisanship. However, for some combinations of platforms, types of misinformation, and mobile vs. desktop devices, the discrepancy between the two paradigms is even greater.