The increasing spread of false stories ("fake news") represents one of the great challenges digital societies face in the 21st century. A German study investigated the effect of media sources (real news vs. fake news sources) on how much individuals believed an online news article and their likelihood of sharing the news article on social media. The data is from an experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to receive one of two versions of a news report on social media. One source was a real media company, and the other was fake. Only the name of the source and the design was varied. The text was kept the same. An example of an article from a fake source (left) and a real source (right) is shown in Figure 10 below. Nachrichten @360 tagesschaude POLIZEI POLIZEI Ewwanderer unter Tatverdachtigan barreprinentiert Figure 10. A news article from a fake source (left) and a real source (right) The participants' belief in the truth of an article was measured using the following question "On a scale from 0 to 6, do you think that the information in the text of (source] is true? 0 means not at all, 6 means completely". A plot of these belief ratings, including the two group means (shown with triangles). is displayed in Figure 11. Bauer, P., and van Hahenberg, B. 2020. Believing and Sharing Information by Fake Sources: An Experiment. https:/doi.org/10.31219/osf.ic/mrxvc " fake - - real 0 2 3 5 6 Belief rating Figure 11. Belief rating by Source Which one of the following statements about the study is false? O The participants were randomly assigned to view either a real or fake news article to try to make the two groups as similar as possible, apart from the news article they viewed. O The response variable was the participant's belief rating in the news article. O This study is an experiment because the researchers intervened by randomly allocating some participants to view the fake news article and others to view the real news article. O Blocking was used in this study, the participants were blocked on whether they were shown a news article from a real or fake source. O The treatment variable was the source of the news article (real or fake)