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Determining the veracity of rumours on Twitter

Giasemidis, Georgios, Singleton, Colin, Agrafiotis, Ioannis, Nurse, Jason R. C., Pilgrim, Alan, Willis, Chris (2016) Determining the veracity of rumours on Twitter. In: 8th International Conference, SocInfo 2016, Bellevue, WA, USA, November 11-14, 2016, Proceedings, Part I. Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series . pp. 185-205. Springer, Germany ISBN 978-3-319-47879-1. (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_12) (KAR id:67488)

Abstract

While social networks can provide an ideal platform for up-to-date information from individuals across the world, it has also proved to be a place where rumours fester and accidental or deliberate misinformation often emerges. In this article, we aim to support the task of making sense from social media data, and specifically, seek to build an autonomous message-classifier that filters relevant and trustworthy information from Twitter. For our work, we collected about 100 million public tweets, including users' past tweets, from which we identified 72 rumours (41 true, 31 false). We considered over 80 trustworthiness measures including the authors' profile and past behaviour, the social network connections (graphs), and the content of tweets themselves. We ran modern machine-learning classifiers over those measures to produce trustworthiness scores at various time windows from the outbreak of the rumour. Such time-windows were key as they allowed useful insight into the progression of the rumours. From our findings, we identified that our model was significantly more accurate than similar studies in the literature. We also identified critical attributes of the data that give rise to the trustworthiness scores assigned. Finally we developed a software demonstration that provides a visual user interface to allow the user to examine the analysis.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Proceeding)
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_12
Subjects: Q Science
T Technology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Jason Nurse
Date Deposited: 03 Jul 2018 15:05 UTC
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 16:28 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/67488 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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