Not Satire bot

Bot that collects news that people mistook for satire

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虚構新聞好きなんだけど最近現実の虚構ぶりのほうが凄いので、「虚構新聞かと思った！」みたいなコメントがついているニュースを自動的にピックアップして紹介するBotを作りました。眺めるだけで面白いです。

Japan has a beloved satire site called Kyoko Shimbun (literally "Fictitious Newspaper", similar to The Onion.) In recent years, however, real-world events have increasingly felt far stranger and more surreal than any fabricated story.

To capture this phenomenon, I built Not Satire Bot (@kyoko_janai), a Twitter bot that automatically detects and curates real news articles that people instinctively mistook for satire. The account resonated widely, growing to over 11,000 followers.

Mechanism & the "Absurdity Index"

The bot crawls social platforms like X and Hatena Bookmark to track reactions like "I swore this was satire." It scores each article's perceived absurdity on a scale from 0 to 100 based on comment density before automatically sharing it.

Curated Headlines

A social-listening experiment using crowd wisdom to document the exact moments reality outpaces fiction.