Source
Chuai & Zhao (2020), LIT-379 (arXiv 2004.10399v3), read in full in NOTE-852. What their corpus showed is THEORY-329, which this entry extends.
The thesis
The paper’s title is its thesis, and the text calls the effect causal throughout: fake news is angrier than true news, and anger in a post makes it spread.
Why it is not held
- The causal half. The evidence is regression on observational data, with no experiment, instrument or natural experiment, and the models leave nearly 90% of the variance unexplained. Content carrying anger words may carry other features that do the work.
- The comparison half. Fake posts were tagged by Weibo’s fact-checkers after they had spread widely, and true posts come from verified accounts, so the fake-against-true gap mixes falsity with selection on spread and on source. Highly retweeted posts carry more anger whatever their label (Table S5).