Sharing, commenting, and reacting to Danish misinformation: A case study of cognitive attraction on Facebook

Social media facilitate a competition for users’ limited attention by bringing various content together, from health advice to entertainment, and from updates from loved ones to misinformation. Especially misinformation has raised societal concern. We evaluated the influence of visual material and cognitive factors of attraction, specifically valenced sentiment, threat-related, intergroup-related, and social information, on engagement scores (i.e., shares, comments, and reactions). We analysed 356 misleading Danish Facebook posts sampled through the fact-checking association TjekDet’s “entirely or partly false” web page by fitting a Bayesian zero-inflated negative binomial regression model. The study showed that videos and images were exceptionally strong predictors of engagement, especially shares. Positivity, negativity, and intergroup-related information also increased engagement, but social information and threat-related information reduced it. Our findings suggest that in a highly competitive online environment, some content biases are stronger than others. Finally, we discuss the potential moderators of their effect such as the users’ reputation management strategies.