CBS News reported on a dubious study claiming that one in fifteen Americans have been on the scene of a mass shooting, an assertion that was swiftly blasted and debunked on social media.

The article from CBS News, based on a study from the University of Colorado Boulder, noted that the research defined a mass shooting as “an incident when four or more people are shot in a public space.” The study nevertheless had a rather broad definition for that criteria, relying on self-reported data and even counting people who merely “could hear the gunfire” from the event.

David Pyrooz, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the study that “these are really high numbers for this seemingly unique and small subset of gun violence.”

CBS News also paired the findings with emotional stories from survivors of shooting incidents. The outlet spoke with Erika Mahoney, whose father was killed while grocery shopping in Boulder four years ago, who said that “the ripple effect is even so much bigger than we can imagine.”

Many social media users noted the deceptive nature of the study and the article, noting how such efforts from academia and the media are thinly veiled attempts to promote gun control.

Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, asked CBS News “on a scale of one to your normal propaganda, how false would you say this latest piece from you is?” The account known as End Wokeness told the outlet to “at least try to make the propaganda plausible.”

Matt Walsh, a podcast host at The Daily Wire, said he thought at first that “they were defining ‘on the scene’ in a comically broad way.” But the outlet was indeed claiming that tens of millions of people “have physically been present when the bullets were flying during a mass shooting.”

The commentator added that “these are just insane numbers” and said that one has to “have an IQ in the double digits to buy this,” leading him to conclude that the study was “laughably fake.”