Social Media, (Mis)information, and Voting Decisions

In a laboratory setting, we study the effect of induced partisanship on costly information acquisition, information sharing, and voting decisions in an endogenous social network. We find social media significantly increases the quality of group decision making when information sharing on the platform is constrained to be truthful. However, when it is possible to share misinformation, social media has a deleterious effect and group decisions are worse than when there is no information sharing at all.