Crisis, country, and party lines: politicians’ misinformation behavior and public engagement

Abstract Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the misinformation-sharing behavior of 3277 politicians and associated public engagement by using data from X (formerly Twitter) during 2020–2021. The analysis was grounded in a novel and comprehensive dataset including over 400,000 tweets covering multi