ABSTRACT
Fake news has a notoriously nefarious impact on online brand reputation, which can be further magnified by the activity of social bots. In this chapter, we investigate the relationship between fake news and bots, as well as their impact on brand value and consumer culture. To do so, we analysed a dataset of 461,303 tweets related to Pepsi, New Balance, and Twitter Inc. This analysis highlights that the activities of fake news and bots seem to be quite disconnected, as if fake news creators and bots have separate “businesses on their own.” Fake news creators are mostly human actors that create or exploit brand-related fake news to push their (mostly right-wing) political agendas rather than ruin brands’ reputation or value. In turn, bots simply piggyback existing controversies triggered by fake news to boost their visibility and, thus, sell commercial products to Twitter audiences.
