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While dubious headlines are rampant across social media platforms, users of right-wing social media platforms are seeing lower-quality news.

Academics analyzed a month’s worth of posts linking to news sites on the left-leaning or centrist BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Twitter/X, along with the more right-wing Truth Social, Gab and Gettr—around 11 million in all.

They rated the quality of the posts on the basis of the reliability of the publisher, using a ratings system released in 2023 that scored more than 11,000 news sites on their accuracy by combining numerous different sets of expert evaluations. They also estimated the political leaning of each domain and checked those estimates against established benchmarks.

On both conservative- and liberal-leaning platforms, they found, the average user received more engagement on posts with lower-quality news links than they did on their higher-quality news posts.

This pattern, they said, is seen even in the absence of ranking algorithms, suggesting that it’s user preferences—not algorithmic bias—that underlies the underperformance of higher-quality news.

“Our result is completely not about differences in the characteristics of the poster, but it’s really just about the characteristics of the content,” said David Rand, professor of information science, marketing and management communication, and psychology at Cornell University.

“It’s not the algorithm; it’s not the user who’s posting it: a user’s posts with lower-quality links get more engagement.”

When it comes to likes and shares, the team found that news aligning with the dominant political slant of a platform got more engagement.

“It’s like an ‘echo platform’ scenario,” said Rand. “Many had argued that people on the right were better at getting engagement on social media, but we find that it totally depends on the platform. When it comes to the advantage of lower-quality news, on the other hand, it’s happening on both sides.”

It’s not, though, happening to the same degree. News shared on platforms with more conservative user bases is, on average, lower in quality. This strong correlation between political leaning and source quality, said the researchers, is unlikely to be the result of ideological bias among fact-checkers when evaluating news source quality.

“This is because politically balanced crowds, which are difficult to accuse of political bias, produce domain quality ratings that show similar patterns to professional fact-checkers,” they said.

This is by no means the first study to establish that news shared on right-wing sites is generally of poorer quality.

This time last year, for example, a U.S.-U.K. team of researchers found that politically conservative users tended to share misinformation at a greater volume than politically liberal users.

For example, the researchers found evidence of conservatives sharing more unambiguously false claims about Covid-19 than liberals, with conservative political elites sharing links to lower quality new sources than liberal political elites.

Similarly, a study carried out across 12 countries last year found that conservatives are worse than liberals at recognizing false climate statements.

And, the team found, “The more conservative the participants, the more likely they were to evaluate these false, but ideologically congruent, statements to be true.”