How Awareness of Media Slant Affects Reaction to News: Field and Experimental Evidence from Microblog Users

This paper investigates whether news consumers react strategically to media slant. Using data from Microblog users and an online experiment that varies whether sources and stances are disclosed, we find that users are more likely to repost news consistent with their own attitudes, yet they also exhibit a higher propensity to repost news inconsistent with the reporting outlet’s general stance. Evidence suggests that this latter behavior reflects strategic inference: users recognize the outlet’s tradeoff between popularity and stance, and thus infer greater popularity for inconsistent news. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that users with stronger Bayesian updating and level-k reasoning abilities display larger strategic reactions. Finally, we show that simply reminding users of media slant can serve as an effective nudge to foster more strategic responses.

This paper was accepted by John Beshears, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72225002, 72394393, 72225001, 72192843, 72531001].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.07339.