Experimental Design Details
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**Step-by-step procedure:**
1. **Collect Political Tweets from Mainstream Media:**
- Use Twitter’s API to collect political tweets from liberal news outlets (YahooNews, NYTimes, HuffPost, NBCNews, Politico, CNN, WashingtonPost, USA Today, CBSNews) and conservative news outlets (FoxNews, NYPost, RCPolitics, TheIJR, WashTimes, CNBC, WSJ, Newsmax, Townhallcom). These are considered a pool of true-news tweets to be matched with false-news tweets.
- Define search parameters using specific keywords to ensure the tweets are about politics and issues relevant to the presidential campaign:
- **Political Keywords:** Biden, Trump, president, election, administration, convention, White House, Harris, Vance, Obama, debate, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, Democratic, politics, political, voter, governor, congress, representative, senate, gov., rep., sen., GOP, mayor, Supreme Court.
- **Issue Keywords:** Abortion, federal ban, Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson, immigration, border, migrants, gang, legal status, illegal, asylum, healthcare, Obamacare, Medicare Medicaid, economy, tax cuts, unemployment, inflation, trade, foreign policy, NATO, isolationist, Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, China, Taiwan, Hamas, equality, LGBTQ, woke, transgender, democracy, January 6, Capitol, dictator, electoral fraud, climate change, Paris climate deal, oil, gas, coal, working class, taxes, tariff, Chinese goods, protectionist.
- Use the most recent collected tweets to ensure relevance. Define a time window to get enough matched pairs of tweets for the experiment.
2. **Collect False News from Fact-Checks:**
- Access Snopes and PolitiFact to collect fact-checked statements characterized as false.
- Add fact checks done after the September 10 Harris-Trump debate by the New York Times.
- Use the most recent fact-checked statements to ensure relevance.
- Exclude fact-checks about videos or photos, focusing on verbal statements.
- For each fact check, determine whether it originated from Republicans or Democrats, assuming the source indicates which party the false news favors.
- Transform the fact-checked false statements into the form of tweets, based on versions produced by ChatGPT.
3. **Select the Democrat False Tweets:**
- Select 10 of the most recent fact-checked statements favoring Democrats, deemed appropriate for the experiment.
- Code the topic of each false tweet using broad categories (e.g., abortion, climate change, economy, healthcare, immigration, integrity of candidate/fraud/election manipulation, LGBTQ+/identity/minority discrimination).
4. **Select Corresponding Republican False Tweets:**
- Select by hand 10 false tweets favoring Republicans, maintaining the same distribution across topics as the pro-Democrat false tweets.
5. **Select True News:**
- Form two lists of true news: one from conservative media and one from liberal media, selecting the 1,500 most recent tweets.
- From these 1,500 tweets, select those usable for the experiment (no pictures, videos, or improper statements, focusing on general interest issues).
- From the selected tweets, pick 10 from Republican media and 10 from Democrat media, ensuring the same distribution across topics as the initial list, and picking the most recent ones.
6. **Generate Four Lists:**
- (1) True tweets from conservative media.
- (2) True tweets from liberal media.
- (3) False tweets favoring Democrats.
- (4) False tweets favoring Republicans.
7. **Assign Photos to Tweets:**
- Choose 4 different neutral photos of Harris and Trump.
- For each tweet, create 4 versions, each with one of the photos, so that each participant sees all four photos, randomly assigned to the tweets.
8. **Assign Tweets to Respondents:**
- Each respondent is presented with 4 tweets, each chosen randomly from the four lists above. All tweets will have different photos, with the photos randomly assigned.