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.

当前研究的一个主要焦点是了解人们为什么会喜欢并在社交媒体上分享假新闻。虽然许多研究都集中在了解新闻分享者的人格水平特征（例如党派偏见和分析性思维）的作用，但尚未研究文章本身的特征。在两项预先注册的研究中，我们检查了贬低性格的标题——旨在贬低某人的性格但对政策或立法没有影响的标题——是否增加了在社交媒体上自我报告分享的可能性。在研究 1 中，我们从在线来源收集了假新闻，并比较了共和党和民主党之间的分享意图。结果显示，与民主党相比，与具有政策含义的新闻相比，共和党人更愿意分享贬低人物的头条新闻。然后我们通过实验应用了这些发现。在研究 2 中，我们开发了一组与支持民主和支持共和党的头条新闻以及针对特定人的新闻（例如，特朗普）与普通人（例如，共和党人）。我们发现，与研究 1 相反，共和党人并不比民主党人更倾向于贬低性格。然而，这些调查结果表明，虽然性格暗杀可能是亲共和党新闻的一个特征，但与民主党相比，它对共和党人的吸引力并不大。无论是否试图贬低对手的性格，具有政策影响的新闻，无论是假的还是真实的，似乎始终对双方成员更具吸引力。因此，假新闻中的字符贬值可能有供应，但没有需求。