Determining the Veracity of Rumours on Twitter

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 mis- information 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

Exploiting context for rumour detection in social media

Tools that are able to detect unverified information posted on social media during a news event can help to avoid the spread of rumours that turn out to be false. In this paper we compare a novel approach using Conditional Random Fields that learns from the sequential dynamics of social media posts with the current state-of-the-art rumour detection system, as well as other baselines. In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying the stance of a post to deem it a rumour but, instead, exploits context learned during the event. Our classifier has improved precision and recall over the state-of-the-art classifier that relies on querying tweets, as well as outperforming our best baseline. Moreover, the results provide evidence for the generalisability of our classifier

All-in-one: Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification

Automatic resolution of rumours is a challenging task that can be broken down into smaller components that make up a pipeline, including rumour detection, rumour tracking and stance classification, leading to the final outcome of determining the veracity of a rumour. In previous work, these steps in the process of rumour verification have been developed as separate components where the output of one feeds into the next. We propose a multi-task learning approach that allows joint training of the main and auxiliary tasks, improving the performance of rumour verification. We examine the connection between the dataset properties and the outcomes of the multi-task learning models used

Vers une analyse des rumeurs dans les réseaux sociaux basée sur la véracité des images : état de l'art

National audienceLe développement rapide des réseaux sociaux a favorisé l'échange d'une masse de données importante, mais aussi la propagation de fausses informations. De nombreux travaux se sont intéressés à la détection des rumeurs, basés principalement sur l'analyse du contenu textuel des messages. Cependant, le contenu visuel, notamment les images, demeure ignoré ou peu exploité. Or, les données visuelles sont très répandues sur les médias sociaux et leur exploitation s'avère être importante pour analyser les rumeurs. Dans cet article, nous présentons une synthèse de l'état de l'art des travaux relatifs à la classi?cation des rumeurs et résumons les tâches principales de ce processus, ainsi que les approches suivies pour analyser ce phénomène. Nous nous focalisons plus particulièrement sur les techniques adoptées pour véri?er la véracité des images. Nous discutons également les jeux de données utilisés pour l'analyse des rumeurs et présentons les pistes de recherche que nous comptons explorer.Le développement rapide des réseaux sociaux a favorisé l'échange d'une masse de données importante, mais aussi la propagation de fausses informations. De nombreux travaux se sont intéressés à la détection des rumeurs, basés principalement sur l'analyse du contenu textuel des messages. Cependant, le contenu visuel, notamment les images, demeure ignoré ou peu exploité. Or, les données visuelles sont très répandues sur les médias sociaux et leur exploitation s'avère être importante pour analyser les rumeurs. Dans cet article, nous présentons une synthèse de l'état de l'art des travaux relatifs à la classification des rumeurs et résumons les tâches principales de ce processus, ainsi que les approches suivies pour analyser ce phénomène. Nous nous focalisons plus particulièrement sur les techniques adoptées pour vérifier la véracité des images. Nous discutons également les jeux de données utilisés pour l'analyse des rumeurs et présentons les pistes de recherche que nous comptons explorer

Social networking sites and the experience of older adult users: a systematic review

This study aimed to systematically review the use of social networking sites (SNSs) from an older adult perspective (all papers had an average sample age of 65+ and samples ranged in age from 50 to 98). Characteristics of older adult SNS users, incentives and disincentives for use, and the relationship between SNS use, wellbeing and cognitive function were explored. From a systematic search, 21 papers met inclusion criteria and were subjected to a quality review. Paper quality was often low or medium, as rated by a standard quality assessment framework. Results indicated that older adult SNS users were more likely to have particular characteristics, including being female and younger. The main incentive for use was to maintain contact with family and friends. Disincentives included privacy concerns and lack of perceived usefulness. The relationship between SNS use, wellbeing and cognitive function was inconclusive. SNS use is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that needs to be understood in the context of broader communication practices, individuals’ social relationships, and individual preferences and characteristics

The Web of False Information: Rumors, Fake News, Hoaxes, Clickbait, and Various Other Shenanigans

A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific topics. These false information campaigns can have dire consequences to the public: mutating their opinions and actions, especially with respect to critical world events like major elections. Evidently, the problem of false information on the Web is a crucial one, and needs increased public awareness, as well as immediate attention from law enforcement agencies, public institutions, and in particular, the research community. In this paper, we make a step in this direction by providing a typology of the Web's false information ecosystem, comprising various types of false information, actors, and their motives. We report a comprehensive overview of existing research on the false information ecosystem by identifying several lines of work: 1) how the public perceives false information; 2) understanding the propagation of false information; 3) detecting and containing false information on the Web; and 4) false information on the political stage. In this work, we pay particular attention to political false information as: 1) it can have dire consequences to the community (e.g., when election results are mutated) and 2) previous work show that this type of false information propagates faster and further when compared to other types of false information. Finally, for each of these lines of work, we report several future research directions that can help us better understand and mitigate the emerging problem of false information dissemination on the Web

Using semantic clustering to support situation awareness on Twitter: The case of World Views

In recent years, situation awareness has been recognised as a critical part of effective decision making, in particular for crisis management. One way to extract value and allow for better situation awareness is to develop a system capable of analysing a dataset of multiple posts, and clustering consistent posts into different views or stories (or, world views). However, this can be challenging as it requires an understanding of the data, including determining what is consistent data, and what data corroborates other data. Attempting to address these problems, this article proposes Subject-Verb-Object Semantic Suffix Tree Clustering (SVOSSTC) and a system to support it, with a special focus on Twitter content. The novelty and value of SVOSSTC is its emphasis on utilising the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) typology in order to construct semantically consistent world views, in which individuals---particularly those involved in crisis response---might achieve an enhanced picture of a situation from social media data. To evaluate our system and its ability to provide enhanced situation awareness, we tested it against existing approaches, including human data analysis, using a variety of real-world scenarios. The results indicated a noteworthy degree of evidence (e.g., in cluster granularity and meaningfulness) to affirm the suitability and rigour of our approach. Moreover, these results highlight this article's proposals as innovative and practical system contributions to the research field

Who can an organization believe in social media? Exploring the process of believability assessment

Data driven decision-making is becoming more and more important for an organization to stay competitive. Data collected and analyzed from social media can teach an organization about its customers in a way that was not possible before. However, in social media there is circulating a lot of data with questionable believability, such as fake news, which risks influencing an organization’s decision-making. This has increased the need to assess the information sources’ credibility in social media, to filter out what and who that is not believable. To examine this assessment process, this study conducted five interviews with four organizations, exploring what dimensions that are considered important in the assessment process, and how they are assessed. This resulted in a refined process model, with the dimensions identity, reputation, and domain expertise as the most prominent. Additional findings are that the process is not governed by any policies or guidelines, and that the assessment process is manual and driven by intuition, which is the opposite of how data driven decisions are increasingly becoming more important