Abstract
<jats:p>High-sensitivity cross-border online narratives can create real diplomatic, legal, mobility, and public-trust risks before the underlying facts are established. This study develops a reusable framework for government response under conditions of high propagation, incomplete evidence, and elevated attribution risk. The analysis integrates two open-source investigations concerning an unverified online narrative alleging that a Japanese national of Chinese descent was compelled to restore Chinese nationality during a visit to China, together with a technical examination of whether public X data can reveal the source IP address or identity of an account operator. The evidence does not independently verify the underlying case, and public X pages, post identifiers, profile locations, or DNS results do not establish an account operator’s source IP or natural-person identity. The study therefore separates case-fact verification from account and technical attribution, evaluates four policy alternatives using a seven-criterion multicriteria decision framework, and develops a rights-constrained model of evidence preservation, public communication, interagency coordination, scenario updating, and performance evaluation. The preferred option—joint verification with two-layer communication—scores 79.75/100 and remains first in more than 99.9% of the reported weight-perturbation trials. The article proposes a 90-day pilot rather than immediate institutionalization, with explicit legal, privacy, evidentiary, technical, and exit safeguards. The central conclusion is that resilient government response should optimize for evidence-calibrated reversibility: it should preserve the ability to update when a claim is confirmed, partially confirmed, remains unresolved, or is falsified, without converting technical ambiguity or narrative intensity into unsupported factual attribution.</jats:p>