standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.| relation to other work | claim_relations | how this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies |
| claim type | claim_type | the shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null |
| concept edge | concept_edges | an asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it |
| concept | concepts | an idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it |
| content tag | content_tags | a finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper |
| contribution | contribution | what the paper claims to add |
| control | controls | an experiment run to eliminate a rival explanation |
| limitation | limitations | what the paper says its evidence cannot support |
| mechanism | mechanisms | how the reported effect is said to come about |
| method | method | how the paper produced its evidence |
| object of study | object_of_study | what the paper is about — the thing it investigates |
| phenomenon | phenomenon | the effect or regularity under study |
| research question | research_question | the question the paper sets itself |
| sense | senses | a distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it |
| transfer | transfers | a method or concept carried in from another field |
Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; 2 of 2 relations here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.
| facet | tag | field | conf. | whose words |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| object_of_study | who actually posted links from fake news domains to their Facebook friends during the 2016 US campaign, measured from profile data rather than from what people say they did Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | object_of_study | the paper's words | |
| research_question | how common fake news sharing was, and which individual characteristics predict it once ideology, partisanship, education and overall posting volume are held constant Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | research_question | the paper's words | |
| contribution | a survey of 3500 linked to 1191 respondents' real Facebook sharing: over 90% shared no fake news at all, conservatives shared more, and the oldest group shared nearly seven times as much as the youngest with everything else held constant Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | contribution | the paper's words | |
| claim_type | existence Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | claim_type | the paper's words | |
| phenomenon | the dissemination of deliberately false political content by ordinary users - rare, concentrated, and predicted by age more robustly than by anything else measured Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | phenomenon | the paper's words | |
| method | observational-study Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: observational-study | method | the paper's words | |
| mechanisms | BuzzSumo ranks domains by Facebook engagement; a journalist checks each for the hallmark features of a fake news site - no contact page, syndicated content, recently registered; a supervised classifier trained on 7 million pages removes anything it calls hard news. Thirty domains become twenty-one, and every share in the dependent variable is a link to one of those twenty-one Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | mechanisms[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| mechanisms | linking profile data to a survey removes the self-report bias in what people say they shared, and it cannot recover what they thought they were sharing. The design buys accuracy about the act and gives up access to the state of mind - which is the quantity the survey experiments measure and cannot observe the act of Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: behaviour without belief | mechanisms[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| mechanisms | 3500 respondents, 1331 consenting to share profile data, 1191 successfully linked - and the linked respondents were more knowledgeable and more politically engaged than those who declined. The behavioural half of the design is available only from people willing to hand it over, and willingness correlates with the subject matter Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: a consent gradient inside the sample | mechanisms[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| mechanisms | sharing is a choice made over what arrived. Without the News Feed, a group that shares more fake news may be a group that saw more of it, and no amount of control for the sharer's characteristics separates the two. The authors state this rather than resolving it Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | mechanisms[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | there is no measure of whether respondents knew that what they shared was false Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | the data are observational and cannot provide causal evidence, and an omitted variable cannot be definitively ruled out Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | half the respondents with Facebook accounts declined to share their profile data, and the linked ones were more knowledgeable and politically engaged Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | the composition of respondents' News Feeds is unobserved, so exposure cannot be separated from willingness to share Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | posts deleted before consent are invisible, and the authors argue rather than measure that this should reduce noise rather than bias Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[4] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | the conservative finding is sensitive to coding and rests on a small number of respondents Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[5] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | the ideological pattern may reflect the pro-Trump slant of the available content and the ordinary tendency to share what one agrees with, rather than a greater propensity to share falsehood Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[6] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| limitations | there is no commonly accepted ground-truth standard for what counts as fake news, so the dependent variable rests on lists built by journalists and academics Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | limitations[7] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| transfers | digital trace data linked to survey response, carried from computational social science into a question political science had been answering with self-report Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | transfers[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| transfers | a supervised text classifier from information retrieval, used not to make the finding but to draw the boundary of the outcome variable Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | transfers[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | the total number of links shared of any kind reported beside the fake news count, and included as a covariate in every model Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: a low fake-news count meaning people do not share links - most respondents shared hundreds, so the rarity is about the content · outcome: held | controls[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | the relationship between overall sharing volume and fake news sharing examined directly, rather than only controlled for Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: the explanation that some respondents will share anything - the heaviest sharers shared LESS fake news, which is the opposite of that prediction · outcome: held | controls[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | the same model applied to hard news sharing as a placebo outcome Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: age predicting online sharing in general - if it did, the predictors of hard news would look the same, and they do not include age at all · outcome: held | controls[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | five different lists of fake news domains, including one built from 948 individual fact-checks and one crowdsourced, with the analysis rerun on each Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: one journalist's list carrying the finding - the category has no ground truth, so the robustness has to be to the choice of vocabulary itself · outcome: held | controls[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | an exact-URL variant of the analysis using only the 948 fact-checked stories, rather than counting every article from a listed domain Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: the assumption that everything published by a fake news domain is fake - the stricter definition does not need it · outcome: held | controls[4] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | hard news domains removed from the list by a classifier trained on 7 million shared pages, so that hyperpartisan sites are excluded from the outcome Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: the contested hyperpartisan category being counted as fake news, which would make an ideological finding partly definitional · outcome: held | controls[5] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | negative binomial and OLS models run alongside the quasi-Poisson, with the quasi-Poisson chosen by a dispersion test Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: the count model's distributional assumptions producing the result · outcome: held | controls[6] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | ideology and party identification, correlated at r = 0.31, entered separately and together, with all three specifications reported Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: a collinearity decision being made silently in the authors' favour - they name the correlation and publish every version · outcome: held | controls[7] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | the models re-fitted as negative binomial and OLS alongside the Poisson and quasi-Poisson specifications, with dispersion tests deciding between the latter two Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: that the sharing result is an artefact of one count-model specification · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held | controls[8] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| controls | respondents asked to check which categories of profile information they were willing to share, with no access to News Feeds or to friends' data Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. eliminates: collecting more than was consented to - the field-by-field opt-in bounds the data at the point of collection · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held | controls[9] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| concepts | fake news Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: fake news | concepts[0] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | hard news Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: hard news | concepts[1] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | links Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: links | concepts[2] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | age Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: age | concepts[3] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | ideology Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: ideology | concepts[4] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | News Feeds Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: News Feeds | concepts[5] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | quasi-Poisson Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: quasi-Poisson | concepts[6] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| concepts | digital media literacy Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: digital media literacy | concepts[7] | 0.95 | the paper's words |
| senses | fake news sharing - AS MEASURED HERE: a post to one's own timeline whose link resolves to one of 21 domains, from profile data, with no measure of whether the sharer believed it Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| senses | fake news - AS DEFINED: knowingly false or misleading content created largely to generate ad revenue, with the authors stating there is no commonly accepted ground-truth standard for the category Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| senses | the domain list - AS BUILT BY BUZZFEED: 30 domains ranked by Facebook engagement and checked by a journalist for the hallmark features of a fake news site Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| senses | the domain list - AFTER THE HARD-NEWS FILTER: 21 domains, with hyperpartisan sites such as Breitbart removed by a supervised classifier so that the contested category is excluded Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| senses | the conservative effect - AS AN OBSERVATION: conservatives shared the most, and the content was overwhelmingly pro-Trump Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[4] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| senses | the conservative effect - AS AN INFERENCE: possibly not a greater tendency to share fake news at all, but the ordinary tendency to share what one agrees with, conditional on exposure the study cannot see Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | senses[5] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| claim_relations | critiques → post-election narratives about the role of social media disinformation, by measuring how rare the behaviour actually was - over 90% of linked respondents shared none at all Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | claim_relations[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| claim_relations | critiques → self-reported measures of online activity, which the linked design is built to avoid Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | claim_relations[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| claim_relations | critiques → the discipline's habit of treating demographic traits as controls to be conditioned away rather than as explanatory factors in their own right Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | claim_relations[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| claim_relations | qualifies → its own ideological finding - sensitive to coding, based on few respondents, and confounded with exposure the design cannot observe Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | claim_relations[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| concept_edges | fake news —distinct-from→ hard news Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. differs in: whether the site is intentionally or systematically factually inaccurate, or merely partisan · the relation itself is separately evidenced · strength of the relation: 0.95 · differs in (stated by the tagger, no quotation): whether the site is intentionally or systematically factually inaccurate, or merely partisan · the relation stated: domains a supervised classifier calls hard news are removed, so that the contested hyperpartisan category is not counted as fake news | concept_edges[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| concept_edges | age —distinct-from→ ideology Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. differs in: whether the predictor survives conditioning on the other · the relation itself is separately evidenced · strength of the relation: 0.95 · differs in (stated by the tagger, no quotation): whether the predictor survives conditioning on the other · the relation stated: holding ideology, party or both constant, each age group still shared more than the next-youngest
Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its span and kept, but age effects hold with ideology held constant; distinct-from is loose. | concept_edges[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | over 90% of linked respondents shared no articles from fake news domains during the 2016 campaign Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | the rarity is specific to the content - most respondents shared between 100 and 1000 links of other kinds Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | those over 65 shared nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest group, holding ideology, education and posting volume constant Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | the heaviest sharers overall shared LESS fake news, so the behaviour is not explained by a general willingness to share anything Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | the same model applied to hard news sharing gives varied predictors and does not include age Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[4] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | The fake-news list contains 21 mostly pro-Trump domains. Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[5] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | the results are essentially invariant across five different lists of what counts as fake news Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[6] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | there is no measure of whether respondents knew what they shared was false Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.findings[7] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | knowingly false or misleading content created largely for ad revenue - with the authors stating that the term covers a variety of phenomena and that no commonly accepted ground-truth standard exists Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: fake news | content_tags.definitions[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | of linked respondents shared no articles from fake news domains at all - the number the title refers to Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.quantities[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | web domains constituting the entire dependent variable, after a journalist's list of 30 was filtered by a hard-news classifier Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. value source note: THE DESCRIPTION DRAWS ON THE PAPER BEYOND THIS QUOTE: the starting list of 30 is described in the appendix ('Our BuzzFeed-based list began with 30 domains'). | content_tags.quantities[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | of the 3500 survey respondents agreed to share Facebook profile data; 1191 were successfully linked Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.quantities[2] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | the correlation between ideological self-placement and party identification, disclosed and handled by reporting all three specifications Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. | content_tags.quantities[3] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | quasi-Poisson Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: quasi-Poisson | content_tags.statistics[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | CI Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: CI | content_tags.statistics[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | age Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: age | content_tags.variables[0] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
| content_tags | fake news Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above. also in: fake news | content_tags.variables[1] | 0.95 | the tagger's words |
Tags that could not be placed in the text:
What was deliberately not tagged, and why, is recorded per paper by the tagger. Where a paper has no such record, this page says so rather than implying that nothing was declined.