Integrating truth bias and elaboration likelihood to understand how political polarisation impacts disinformation engagement on social media

Abstract Political polarisation has become an increasingly alarming issue in society, exacerbated by the widespread use of social media and the development of filter bubbles among social media users. This environment has left users susceptible to disinformation, especially those with whom a user is politically aligned. In this research, we integrate truth bias, elaboration likelihood model and new media literacy into a model for explaining social media engagement (with both disinformation and factual information) and analysing how political polarisation (operationalised as political alignment between users) influences perceptions and behaviours. Using an experimental design, we analyse the model separately for posts containing disinformation and factual information, highlighting key differences. Political alignment positively moderates truth bias's effect on engagement with disinformation. For both disinformation and factual information, political alignment moderates the effect of generalised communicative suspicion (GCS) on truth bias, such that GCS's effect on truth bias flips from negative to positive as political alignment increases. Issue involvement and political alignment appear to be the primary drivers of disinformation engagement, with critical consuming media literacy failing to mitigate engagement. Our findings contribute to the understanding of persuasion, conviction, amplification, polarisation and aversion related to fake news on social media.