For this specific study, we were interested in finding out if the videos (about emotionally manipulative language, which you can watch here, or false dichotomies, which you can watch here) are effective at improving people’s ability to spot manipulative social media content if you run them as an advertisement on YouTube. To do so, we ran a YouTube ad campaign among a random sample of YouTube users which met the following criteria: 1) 18 years or older; 2) a US resident; 3) English-speaking; 4) having recently watched at least one political news video on YouTube. Within this sample, people were randomly shown either the emotional language video or the false dichotomies video as a YouTube ad. A random 30% of people who were shown either video as an ad was also shown a single survey question, where they were asked to identify which particular manipulation technique is being used in a fictional social media post. In total, we created 20 such social media posts, which we stripped of all source and other identifying information. Half of these posts (10) were phrased to be emotionally manipulative, whereas the other half were each manipulative post’s neutral (non-manipulative) pair. You can see an example of a manipulative post and its neutral pair below.