"Every two weeks, we retrieved social media engagement data for 5,000 news stories that had the most engagement in the past seven days," they wrote. Each article was carefully fact-checked. "They all had a connection to U.S. politics in some way," Garrett told CNN. People who identified as independent politically were excluded from the panel, and Garrett and Bond tried to keep the same people on the panel from month to month for consistency. "Consistent with other studies, we find that American conservatives are more likely than liberals to hold misperceptions," they wrote. The most viral stories tended to appeal to conservatives, they found. Just 10% were biased toward liberal points of view.