Scientific evidence shows that there is political asymmetry in the spread of disinformation on social media. Although most studies use data from the United States — assessing mainly differences between Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and liberals — the pattern has been observed consistently from 2016 to the present.

Conservatives Spread More Disinformation Than Liberals

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Extensive research with different methodological approaches shows that conservatives tend to share significantly more disinformation than liberals or moderates. A study on the 2016 U. S. presidential election showed that 18.1% of Republican Facebook users shared disinformation, against 3.5% of Democrats. Another study from the same electoral period analyzed 16,442 Twitter accounts with similar results.

A large-scale survey on disinformation based on Facebook images compiled almost 14 million posts during the 2020 election. Results showed that right-leaning images were 5 to 8 times more likely to be false or misleading than those associated with left-wing positions. Another study conducted in collaboration with Meta during the same period analyzed 208 million American users and tracked all URLs from political news posted on the platform between September 2020 and February 2021, and confirmed the same asymmetry.

This pattern was also observed among political leaders, although not in all countries evenly. An analysis of 3.4 million tweets from U. S. American, British and German politicians made between 2016 and 2022 found that Republican members of the U. S. Congress were increasingly circulating news from dubious sources, thus widening the gap with their Democrat counterparts. In Germany and the United Kingdom, on the other hand, differences were fewer. A more thorough analysis that examined 32 million tweets from parliamentarians in 26 European countries for 6 years revealed that politicians associated with radical right-wing populist parties spread significantly more disinformation than their traditional counterparts, while left-wing populism does not show that dissimilarity.

The Asymmetry Persists, Regardless of Who Assesses It

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A frequent objection accuses these results of reflecting the bias of the people defining what disinformation is: professional fact-checkers, journalists and academics. A 2024 study approached this critique with three complementary methods. First, it compared URLs shared by Trump users and Biden users with multiple website rating lists. Then, it implemented a crucial method: the study used trustworthiness ratings created by politically balanced groups of laypeople: 970 demographically representative Americans, and even created a purposefully right-biased quality measure using the trustworthiness ratings of Republican laypeople. Results were practically the same for all three analysis: the median Trump hashtag poster shared four times more links to low-quality websites compared with the median Biden hashtag poster.

A study from 2025 examined 218,382 notes from X’s Community Notes program, where platform users — rather than professional fact-checkers — mark misleading content through consensus across different perspectives. Once again, 2.3 times as many posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats.

The assertiveness of this finding comes precisely from the variety of approaches: various platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X), different time periods, multiple political contexts, and diverse assessment criteria. Party asymmetry in the spread of disinformation remains steady through all these scenarios..