12,356 research outputs found
Investigating Rumor Propagation with TwitterTrails
Social media have become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists
to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The
quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can
sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. As a
way to study and react to this trend, we introduce {\sc TwitterTrails}, an
interactive, web-based tool ({\tt twittertrails.com}) that allows users to
investigate the origin and propagation characteristics of a rumor and its
refutation, if any, on Twitter. Visualizations of burst activity, propagation
timeline, retweet and co-retweeted networks help its users trace the spread of
a story. Within minutes {\sc TwitterTrails} will collect relevant tweets and
automatically answer several important questions regarding a rumor: its
originator, burst characteristics, propagators and main actors according to the
audience. In addition, it will compute and report the rumor's level of
visibility and, as an example of the power of crowdsourcing, the audience's
skepticism towards it which correlates with the rumor's credibility. We
envision {\sc TwitterTrails} as valuable tool for individual use, but we
especially for amateur and professional journalists investigating recent and
breaking stories. Further, its expanding collection of investigated rumors can
be used to answer questions regarding the amount and success of misinformation
on Twitter.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, under revie
SUPER: Towards the Use of Social Sensors for Security Assessments and Proactive Management of Emergencies
Social media statistics during recent disasters (e.g. the 20 million tweets relating to 'Sandy' storm and the sharing of related photos in Instagram at a rate of 10/sec) suggest that the understanding and management of real-world events by civil protection and law enforcement agencies could benefit from the effective blending of social media information into their resilience processes. In this paper, we argue that despite the widespread use of social media in various domains (e.g. marketing/branding/finance), there is still no easy, standardized and effective way to leverage different social media streams -- also referred to as social sensors -- in security/emergency management applications. We also describe the EU FP7 project SUPER (Social sensors for secUrity assessments and Proactive EmeRgencies management), started in 2014, which aims to tackle this technology gap
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