In the social media era, fabricated narratives—a continuum ranging from slight exaggerations to outright falsehoods—pose significant threats to firms and industries. However, crisis management research has offered little insight on how to respond to fabricated narratives, which are becoming a greater part of the competitive landscape and which require a different repertoire of responses. In response to this limitation, we explicate a framework to manage fabricated social media narratives across multiple reoccurring stages: 1) latent, 2) incubation, 3) active crisis, and 4) dormant crisis stages. We theorize that different strategies are more effective in different stages. Specifically, to effectively prevent, attenuate, refute and deflect fabricated narratives, we posit that the firm can employ a repertoire of strategies targeting diverse actors based on their motives in perpetuating fabricated narratives: inadvertent actor and malicious actor. Our primary contribution is to redirect the crisis and impression management literatures to address the growing threat posed by fabricated narratives.
