Vote: Publish pending minor changes
Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. I do offer a few comments that I believe will help the authors improve the overall manuscript.
The current study explores the content and themes of “#FalseFlag” tweets during the six months following the active shooter event at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Overall, the manuscript is well written; however, I simply offer some minor points of clarification. The authors’ research has potential to contribute to the field.
Under the Political Ideology and Conspiracy Theory Belief section, in the sentence, “While some argue that individuals on the right more often use a bottom-up psychological process that makes them more apt to believe conspiracy theories (van der Linden et al., 2021),..” could the authors briefly follow-up with what it means to use a bottom-up psychological process?
Under the Impacts of Social Media Section, the authors should note Twitter is now known as X.
Under the Methods and Data Collection section it is stated that, “a Twitter developer account and obtaining an API developer key and bearer token, data were collected in RStudio using the AcademicTwitteR package.” Could the authors briefly explain what this is.
Under the Results section “False Flag Types” the authors note to See Figure X, but Figure X is not provided.
In the results section it would be helpful if the authors reminded the readers how many tweets fell into this category as they explain it and provide an example.
The second paragraph of the Discussion sections contains the following sentence, “Most of those who defined “False Flag” indicated that they believed the event did occur and included real victims but was orchestrated by the government.” Add the word “event”.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)