Mechanism

The middleman

An institution that stands between people and something they need, controls access to it, and is paid for that position.

Information and Perception

Finding INF-1.1: Primary record The Telecommunications Act of 1996 directed the FCC to eliminate any national limit on the number of AM or FM stations one entity may own, set the national television audience-reach limit at 35 percent and set broadcast license terms of up to 8 years. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2004, approved 23 January 2004, raised the television limit to 39 percent and exempted the 39 percent rule from the Commission's quadrennial review.
Finding INF-1.2: Primary record On 19 March 2026 the FCC's Media Bureau granted Nexstar's acquisition of TEGNA and waived the National Television Ownership Rule; the order states that Nexstar would reach 54.5 percent of the national audience after the UHF discount, with six stations divested, and lists among its reasons that the combination will preserve Nexstar's ability to preempt network programming in favor of programming that better serves the local community. On 6 August 2026 the Commission adopted a Report and Order repealing the national television multiple ownership rule and replacing it with case-by-case review, over a dissent by Commissioner Gomez.
Finding INF-1.13: Primary record The FCC's 2011 order approving Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal made a journalistic-independence policy, extended to the influence of each of Comcast-NBCU's owners, a condition of approval. The FCC's 2025 order approving the transfer of Paramount to Skydance recites Skydance's commitments to an ombudsman for CBS for at least two years and to viewpoint diversity, and records that CBS/Skydance released the complete interview transcript that a petitioner had requested.
Finding INF-1.14: Reported On 1 July 2025 Paramount announced that it would pay $16 million to settle President Trump's suit over a "60 Minutes" interview, with no apology and a commitment to release transcripts of future interviews with presidential candidates. The FCC approved the Skydance transfer on 24 July 2025, and its order does not mention the settlement.
Finding INF-1.15: Primary record On 17 September 2025 Nexstar announced that its ABC-affiliated stations would preempt "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" for the foreseeable future, and gave its own objection to Mr. Kimmel's comments as its reason. The release does not mention the FCC or any government request; Nexstar's agreement to acquire TEGNA, dated 18 August 2025, was pending before the FCC on that date.
Finding INF-3.1: Peer-reviewed Five publishers produced more than half of all papers indexed in the Web of Science in 2013, up from about one-fifth in the natural and medical sciences in 1973.
Finding INF-3.2: Primary record RELX reported 2025 revenue of GBP 2,714m and adjusted operating profit of GBP 1,035m for its Scientific, Technical & Medical segment, which is Elsevier. The report states that Elsevier received more than 4.2 million submissions in 2025, published more than 795,000 articles, and worked with over 37,000 editors and over 1.9 million reviewers.
Finding INF-3.3: Primary record Wiley's fiscal 2024 Form 10-K states that the Hindawi special issues program was suspended in the third quarter of fiscal 2023 because certain special issues contained compromised articles. The Lancet's retraction notice of 5 June 2020 records that three authors requested retraction after the data vendor would not transfer the full dataset for an independent audit and the audit reviewers withdrew.
Finding INF-3.6: Primary record In its opinion of 15 November 2022 on the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, a federal court found that the five largest trade publishers held nearly 60 percent of 2021 trade-book sales and that literary agents prioritize submitting manuscripts to their imprints because of their ability to pay.
Finding INF-3.7: Primary record McGraw Hill's Form 10-K filed 11 June 2026 states that its market is fairly concentrated and that its K-12 materials in California, Florida and Texas are subject to approval by state boards of education. Texas Education Code section 31.022 requires the State Board of Education to determine that instructional material is free from factual error before approving it, and California Education Code section 60200 has the State Board adopt at least five basic instructional materials per subject for kindergarten through grade 8.
Finding INF-3.8: Primary record Wikipedia's policies base content on published, independent, reliable sources and presume a stand-alone article only for topics with significant coverage in independent reliable sources. Its perennial-sources page sorts sources into five statuses by community consensus. In the project's count of the page on 10 November 2026, the page had 497 rows: 472 carried a status icon (156 generally reliable, 112 no consensus, 148 generally unreliable and 56 deprecated) and 25 were blacklisted.
Finding INF-3.9: Primary record A request for comment closed by volunteers on 8 February 2017 concluded that the Daily Mail is generally unreliable and its use as a reference generally prohibited, and the perennial-sources page's Daily Mail entry states that it was the first source to be deprecated. The page's definition of Deprecated in an archive capture of 17 January 2019 allows a deprecated source to be cited as a primary source when it is the topic of discussion, and the capture of 1 October 2026 does not carry that clause.
Finding INF-3.11: Primary record On 16 June 2021 the Arbitration Committee replaced community sanctions on COVID-19 articles with discretionary sanctions by an 8-1-1 motion that contains no findings of fact and no ruling on which sources count.
Finding INF-3.12: Primary record Reddit's content policy captured on 11 September 2015 lists quarantining and banning of communities among its enforcement options and states that Reddit does not prescribe moderators' use of its tools, and on 29 June 2020 Reddit announced that it was banning about 2,000 subreddits, including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse. A peer-reviewed study found that quarantining r/TheRedPill and r/The_Donald cut new-user influx by 79.5% and 58% while existing users' misogyny and racism did not change.
Finding INF-3.13: Primary record Reddit stated on 9 June 2023 that it would charge $0.24 per 1,000 API calls above free limits from 1 July 2023. Its Form S-1 of 22 February 2024 states that in June 2023 moderators of certain communities inhibited normal operations, in many cases in violation of site-wide rules, and that this has not historically had a material impact.
Finding INF-3.14: Primary record Reddit reports that from July to December 2023 moderators removed 1.9% and admins 1.8% of all content created, and that admins banned 640,685 communities: 456,849 (71%) for spam and 183,836 for non-spam violations, 92% of the non-spam bans because the community was unmoderated. Reddit's Form S-1 reports an average of over 60,000 daily active volunteer moderators in December 2023, and a peer study of 126 subreddits found that invisible work is a median 43% of human moderator labor.
Finding INF-4.2: Primary record The FBI agent who ran the Bureau's platform contacts testified, from recollection, that about half of the items the FBI flagged led a platform to act under its terms of service. Twitter told a court in 2023 that its employees reviewed the FBI's flagged tweets independently.
Finding INF-4.4: Primary record Twitter's chief executive told the Senate Judiciary Committee on 17 November 2020 that Twitter's 2018 hacked-materials policy was informed by conversations with the U.S. government. Twitter's head of Site Integrity stated in a declaration to the Federal Election Commission that Twitter's Trust and Safety leadership decided on 14 October 2020 to enforce the policy against the New York Post articles.
Finding INF-4.5: Primary record Meta (26 August 2024) and Alphabet (23 September 2025) each wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that senior Biden administration officials pressed them in 2021 over COVID-19 content, and each wrote that the company made its own decisions on removal and enforcement.
Finding INF-4.10: Primary record On 12 August 2024 Commissioner Breton wrote to X's owner that the European Commission would not hesitate to make full use of its toolbox, including interim measures, and on 18 February 2025 the Commission wrote that the Digital Services Act does not regulate speech. The Commission's first non-compliance decision under the Act, against X on 5 December 2025, fined X 120 million euros for blue-checkmark design, its advertising repository and researcher data access, and did not concern the removal of any post.
Finding INF-4.13: Primary record The 2026 consent decree in Missouri v. Biden bars the Surgeon General, the CDC and CISA from threatening platforms with punishment unless they remove or reduce protected speech, and records no admission (para. 17). The Ninth Circuit held in O'Handley (2023) that compliance with a California office's flag was optional for Twitter, with no intimation of adverse consequences, and that Twitter's moderation was not state action. Twitter's 2023 brief in Trump v. Twitter, a litigation position, argues that coercion requires the threat of a government sanction and that the FBI's emails were advisory.
Finding INF-5.7: Primary record Meta's COVID-19 misinformation page states that from 8 February 2021 it would remove the claim "COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured," and states on 26 May 2021 that it "will no longer remove" that claim "in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19."
Finding INF-5.10: Primary record On 7 January 2025 Meta announced that it would end its U.S. third-party fact-checking program, saying that "a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor." Lead Stories, a participating fact-checker, replied that the labels and their consequences "were always 100% under the control of Meta."
Finding INF-5.14: Primary record Cochrane's Governing Board voted unanimously on 25 September 2018 to end Peter Gøtzsche's membership, his Board seat and his directorship of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, citing a pattern of disruptive behavior, personal views presented as Cochrane's, and breaches of trustee confidentiality. Cochrane's editor in chief had written on 29 August 2018 that the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine article by Gøtzsche and a coauthor on Cochrane's HPV vaccine review "substantially overstated its criticisms."
Finding INF-5.15: Primary record On 9 August 2024 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Children's Health Defense's suit against Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, the Poynter Institute and Science Feedback, holding that the alleged harm came from Meta's own policy and that Children's Health Defense alleged no government coercion or agreement. The opinion recites that Meta disabled the group's donate button and barred its ads because it "repeatedly posted content that has been disputed by third-party fact-checkers."

Medicine and Public Health

Finding MED-1.2: Primary record The AMA's Council on Medical Education started the Flexner study. The Carnegie Foundation paid for it and published it.
Finding MED-1.9: Peer-reviewed Five of the seven Black medical schools closed after the reform, and women remained under 5 percent of medical graduates until the Second World War.
Finding MED-1.10: Peer-reviewed Graduates of more rigorous medical schools were less likely to practice in rural areas, and the closure of a medical school within 300 miles reduced physicians per capita.
Finding MED-5.2: Primary record Since 1988, a person injured by a covered vaccine must take the claim to a federal compensation program before suing the manufacturer.

War and Defense

No findings in this subject are tagged with this mechanism.

Politics and Government

No findings in this subject are tagged with this mechanism.

Food and Agriculture

No findings in this subject are tagged with this mechanism.

Religious Institutions

Finding REL-1.1: Primary record Pope Leo X's bull Sacrosanctis Salvatoris et Redemptoris nostri of 31 March 1515 opened an eight-year indulgence for the rebuilding of St. Peter's in the provinces of Mainz and Magdeburg and the Brandenburg lands. It named Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg and the guardian of the Observant Franciscans at Mainz as commissioners and granted plenary remission of sins in return for alms put into the chests, tied in the text to confession and absolution by a chosen confessor.
Finding REL-1.2: Reported According to Aloys Schulte's German translation of the Vatican documents, the envoys' petition of 1 August 1514 offered Leo X 10,000 ducats and asked that half the proceeds go to St. Peter's and half to Albert and the churches of Mainz, Magdeburg and Halberstadt. The motu proprio of 15 April 1515 records that Albert paid the 10,000 ducats and that no revocation or competing plenary indulgence would be allowed for eight years.
Finding REL-1.3: Reported A debt bond of 15 May 1514, printed by Schulte, records that Albert of Brandenburg owed Jakob Fugger about 21,000 ducats de camera, at 100 ducats to 140 gulden, plus 500 gulden for exchange, which Schulte reports was for the fees for confirming Albert's election as archbishop of Mainz. The bond sets the first instalment at St. James's day (25 July) and the second at Michaelmas (29 September) 1514. Schulte gives the total as 29,000 Rhenish gulden and glosses the second date as 29 October.
Finding REL-1.4: Reported Schulte reports that the commissioners' order of 28 May 1517 gave Jakob Fugger one of the keys to the indulgence chests and directed that, after costs, one half of the contents go to the Fugger as the papal share and the other half to the Fugger in payment of Albert's debt.
Finding REL-1.5: Primary record Albert's Instructio Summaria set a contribution by rank: at least 25 Rhenish gulden for kings, queens, archbishops, bishops and other great princes, 10 for abbots, counts and wealthy nobles, down to half a florin for others. It told those without money to supply their contribution by prayer and fasting.
Finding REL-1.6: Reported In the excerpt printed by Kidd, the Instructio Summaria declares that to obtain the two principal graces it names it was not necessary to confess or visit churches, only to redeem the confessional letter, which cost a quarter of a Rhenish gulden in addition to the ordinary tax. It also stated that those contributing for souls in purgatory need not be contrite or confessed.
Finding REL-2.4: Primary record Between 1530 and 1543 the English Crown, by proclamation, injunction and statute, prohibited English Scripture, then required an English Bible in every parish church, then barred women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, servingmen of yeoman rank or under, husbandmen and laborers from reading it.
Finding REL-2.5: Primary record In 1534 Parliament required cathedral chapters to elect the person the king named in his letter missive, declared the king supreme head of the Church of England and granted the Crown first fruits and an annual tenth of church income; in 1559 Parliament required clergy and royal officers to swear that the queen is "only supreme governor" and every minister to use the Book of Common Prayer.
Finding REL-2.6: Primary record Between 1661 and 1673 Parliament required officeholders to receive the sacrament according to the Church of England and fined nonconforming ministers and attenders at conventicles with part of the fines going to informers, and the Toleration Act of 1689 excused Protestant dissenters from the attendance penalties while saving tithes, parochial duties and ecclesiastical-court prosecution.