Where Does Rhetorical Distortion Live? A Multi-Platform, Multi-Language Measurement of Influencer Content

Abstract

Much 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-Wallis $\varepsilon^2=0.33$; two-way ANOVA $η_p^2=0.49$ for platform vs. $0.09$ for category). X/Twitter scores highest (DI 7.74 vs. 0.78 for RSS). Classifying tweets and their replies separately shows where this comes from: the reply layer readers see under a post (its top-5 replies) carries 3.5x the distortion of the tweet it answers (7.65 vs. 2.17, $p<10^{-6}$, 36 of 43 accounts), driven by Loaded Language. At equal text length the gap shrinks to 1.5x but remains significant, and creator tweets alone are statistically indistinguishable from YouTube and Bluesky. Two independent human annotators confirm the reply gap, and the platform ordering and the reply gap replicate with GPT-4o as a second classifier. On threaded platforms, measured distortion thus lives largely in the audience layer, which motivates measurement that separates creator and reply text.