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ALT First page of the article in Political Communication, 2026, volume 43, issue 6, pages 851–887. Title: Multi-Platform Referrers of Misinformation: A Comparative Analysis of Misinformation Visits Referred by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. Authors: Ross Dahlke, Ryan C. Moore, Danya Adib-Azpeitia, Johan Ugander, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. The abstract says existing research counts only misinformation visits that directly follow social media. The authors call this approach the direct referrer paradigm. They introduce the embedded referrer paradigm, which uses counterfactual simulations to count social media's role across people's whole browsing journeys. The data are 3 months of web browsing from 1,240 Americans (21 million website visits). Effects under the embedded referrer paradigm are 1.5 to 15+ times larger than effects under the direct referrer paradigm.

ALT Figure 1, a diagram with two panels. Panel A, "Captured by Direct Referrer Paradigm," shows one arrow from a Facebook box to a Misinformation Website box. Panel B, "Captured by Embedded Referrer Paradigm But Not Direct Referrer Paradigm," shows a chain of four boxes: Facebook, then Curiosity, then Intermediate Website, then Misinformation Website. In Panel A, the direct referrer paradigm gives Facebook all the credit for the misinformation visit. In Panel B, the direct referrer paradigm gives Facebook no credit, even though the path started on Facebook. The embedded referrer paradigm captures Facebook's role by simulating the person's path as if they could not visit Facebook.

ALT Figure 2, a flow diagram of the study's analysis steps. A: Web browsing data from desktop and laptop computers, smartphones, and tablets, collected August 24 to December 7, 2020. The data are shown as a table of user IDs, timestamps, and URLs, with a survey alongside. B: The browsing data give each person a transition matrix, the probability of moving from one website to another. C: When an observed path is about to reach a social media platform, such as Facebook, the path is diverted to a different platform using experimentally derived diversion ratios. D: The diverted path is simulated to completion with the person's transition matrix. E: Multi-level models compare visits to misinformation websites in the simulated paths with visits in the observed paths.

ALT Table 1, "Direct versus embedded referrer paradigm results." The table gives the estimated percentage reduction in visits to misinformation websites if each of seven platforms were removed. Estimates appear under both paradigms, for all misinformation and separately for conservative, liberal, and non-ideological misinformation. The data cover 1,240 participants and 395,936 sessions. For all misinformation, removing Facebook cuts visits by 9.25% under the direct paradigm and by 14.07% under the embedded paradigm. Twitter: 2.17% versus 12.27%. YouTube: 2.08% versus 4.92%. For all misinformation, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok have estimates near zero, and their confidence intervals include zero. The largest gaps are for liberal misinformation: Facebook 11.43% versus 58.56%, YouTube 1.93% versus 29.30%, and Twitter 3.59% versus 24.22%.