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Abstract

The advent of the internet has allowed non-institutional actors to release information into the public realm due to reduced gatekeeping. Recently, this has raised concerns about the spread of low-credibility information such as misinformation and fake news. While most research has focused on low-credibility information spreading in the context of social media or mainstream media, less attention has been paid to whether they have been channeled into policy documents. Given the new waves of increasingly partisan think tanks, this study aims to identify the extent to which low-credibility information has also been spreading in policy documents. Using the Overton policy dataset, we identified the citations of low-credibility news sites and traced the citation patterns of those news sites onto congressional committee documents. We find that despite the alarming proportion of low credibility documents cited in policy documents, the channeling of misinformation from fake news articles onto legislation and policy-making is relatively rare, with the exception of “invited speaker” citations. Compared with the social media ecosystem that previous researchers have found to amplify the spread of fake news, the ecosystem of policy documents was found to suppress the spread of it by selecting out problematic misinformation claims at every step of the citation process. These findings provide reassurance that think tanks, while increasingly partisan, have generally not crossed the boundary towards producing misinformation. However, further work is needed to solidify these preliminary findings.

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