The increasing popularity of Twitter and other microblogs makes improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of microblogs evermore important. We propose a method of ranking of tweets considering trustworthiness and content based popularity. The analysis of trustworthiness and popularity exploits the implicit relationships between the tweets. We model microblog ecosystem as a three-layer graph consisting of : (i) users (ii) tweets and (iii) web pages. We propose to derive trust and popularity scores of entities in these three layers, and propagate the scores to tweets considering the inter-layer relations. Our preliminary evaluations show improvement in precision and trustworthiness over the baseline methods and acceptable computation timings.
Credibility analysis of Twitter stories have been attempted by Castillo @cite_9 . The work tries to classify Twitter story threads as credible or incredible. Our problem is different, since we try to assess the credibility of individual tweets. As the feature space is much smaller for an individual tweet---compared the Twitter story threads---the problem becomes harder.
@cite_9
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We analyze the information credibility of news propagated through Twitter, a popular microblogging service. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally. On this paper we focus on automatic methods for assessing the credibility of a given set of tweets. Specifically, we analyze microblog postings related to "trending" topics, and classify them as credible or not credible, based on features extracted from them. We use features from users' posting and re-posting ("re-tweeting") behavior, from the text of the posts, and from citations to external sources. We evaluate our methods using a significant number of human assessments about the credibility of items on a recent sample of Twitter postings. Our results shows that there are measurable differences in the way messages propagate, that can be used to classify them automatically as credible or not credible, with precision and recall in the range of 70 to 80 . Though Twitter acts as a realtime news source with people acting as sensors and sending event updates from all over the world, rumors spread via Twitter have been noted to cause considerable damage. Given a set of popular Twitter events along with related users and tweets, we study the problem of automatically assessing the credibility of such events. We propose a credibility analysis approach enhanced with event graph-based optimization to solve the problem. First we experiment by performing PageRanklike credibility propagation on a multi-typed network consisting of events, tweets, and users. Further, within each iteration, we enhance the basic trust analysis by updating event credibility scores using regularization on a new graph of events. Our experiments using events extracted from two tweet feed datasets, each with millions of tweets show that our event graph optimization approach outperforms the basic credibility analysis approach. Also, our methods are significantly more accurate (∼86 ) than the decision tree classifier approach (∼72 ). Twitter is now used to distribute substantive content such as breaking news, increasing the importance of assessing the credibility of tweets. As users increasingly access tweets through search, they have less information on which to base credibility judgments as compared to consuming content from direct social network connections. We present survey results regarding users' perceptions of tweet credibility. We find a disparity between features users consider relevant to credibility assessment and those currently revealed by search engines. We then conducted two experiments in which we systematically manipulated several features of tweets to assess their impact on credibility ratings. We show that users are poor judges of truthfulness based on content alone, and instead are influenced by heuristics such as user name when making credibility assessments. Based on these findings, we discuss strategies tweet authors can use to enhance their credibility with readers (and strategies astute readers should be aware of!). We propose design improvements for displaying social search results so as to better convey credibility. Twitter is a major forum for rapid dissemination of user-provided content in real time. As such, a large proportion of the information it contains is not particularly relevant to many users and in fact is perceived as unwanted 'noise' by many. There has been increased research interest in predicting whether tweets are relevant, newsworthy or credible, using a variety of models and methods. In this paper, we focus on an analysis that highlights the utility of the individual features in Twitter such as hash tags, retweets and mentions for predicting credibility. We first describe a context-based evaluation of the utility of a set of features for predicting manually provided credibility assessments on a corpus of microblog tweets. This is followed by an evaluation of the distribution presence of each feature across 8 diverse crawls of tweet data. Last, an analysis of feature distribution across dyadic pairs of tweets and retweet chains of various lengths is described. Our results show that the best indicators of credibility include URLs, mentions, retweets and tweet length and that features occur more prominently in data describing emergency and unrest situations.