Cognitive Attraction and the Spread of Misinformation on Danish Facebook

Social media facilitate a continuous stream of information where the barriers of previous information environments have collapsed. In this space, health advice, misinformation, cat videos, and similar content compete for users’ limited attention. This study explored the hypothesis that content biases support the spread of nonadaptive information online. To test this, we analyzed 1,022,526 instances of engagement (reactions, comments, shares) generated by 356 misleading Facebook posts. We evaluated the relationship between the presence of visual material, cognitive factors of attraction (social, threat-related, intergroup-related information, positivity, and negativity biases), and engagement scores by fitting a Bayesian negative binomial model. Cognitive attractive features were present in 92% of the posts, but only visual material, intergroup-related information, and positive and negative sentiment increased engagement. The findings suggest that the specifics of social media, such as the visibility structures of platforms and competition from salient, accurate information, may moderate what gets transmitted.