Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines – headlines designed to deprecate someone’s character, but which have no impact on policy or legislation – increased the likelihood of self-reported sharing on social media. In Study 1 we harvested fake news items from online sources and compared sharing intentions between Republicans and Democrats. Results showed that, compared to Democrats, Republicans had greater intention to share character-deprecation headlines compared to news with policy implications. We then applied these findings experimentally. In Study 2 we developed a set of fake news items that was matched for content across pro-Democratic and pro-Republican headlines and across news focusing on a specific person (e.g., Trump) versus a generic person (e.g., a Republican). We found that, contrary to Study 1, Republicans were no more inclined toward character deprecation than Democrats. However, these findings suggest that while character assassination may be a feature of pro-Republican news, it is not more attractive to Republicans versus Democrats. News with policy implications, whether fake or real, seems consistently more attractive to members of both parties regardless of whether it attempts to deprecate an opponent’s character. Thus, character deprecation in fake news may in be in supply, but not in demand.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it