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Beaten Up on Twitter? Exploring Fake News and Satirical Responses During the Black Panther Movie Event

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Abstract

The use of user-generated online satire, itself a form of fake news, may be one strategy used to highlight and shame fake news stories and promoters. Here, we begin to explore the differences between non-satire and satire fake posts by looking at Twitter data related to false stories of racially-motivated attacks during the Black Panther movie opening. Overall, we found that very few fake tweets of either type had high levels of replies or retweets. We found some evidence that the satire responses were supported and shared to a greater extent than the original non-satire tweets, which leaves open the possibility that satire may have been helpful in calling out the fake attack posts. We also found some evidence that the satire responses fooled some users into believing them to be real stories.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grants - N000141812108 and N00014-17-1-2605/25323818CMU and the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organization Systems (CASOS). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the ONR or the U.S. government.

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Correspondence to Matthew Babcock .

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Babcock, M., Beskow, D.M., Carley, K.M. (2018). Beaten Up on Twitter? Exploring Fake News and Satirical Responses During the Black Panther Movie Event. In: Thomson, R., Dancy, C., Hyder, A., Bisgin, H. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10899. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93372-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93372-6_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93372-6

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