With a little help from Andrew T. with my RubberDuck debugging, I found a solution to this problem.
What you need to do is set background="@android:color/transparent to CheckBox and the invisible field will disappear from your View .
So my new CheckBox looks like this:
<CheckBox android:id="@+id/favoritesBox" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:gravity="center" android:button="@null" android:background="@android:color/transparent" android:tag="1" android:textStyle="italic" android:text="@string/details_tags_favs" />
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