As the internet and social media continue to become increasingly used for sharing break- ing news and important updates, it is with great motivation to study the behaviors of online users during crisis events. One of the biggest issues with obtaining information online is the veracity of such content. Given this vulnerability, misinformation becomes a very danger- ous and real threat when spread online. This study investigates misinformation debunking efforts and fills the research gap on cross-platform information sharing when misinforma- tion is spread during disasters. The false rumor “immigration status is checked at shelters” spread in both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in 2017 and was analyzed in this paper based on a collection of 12,900 tweets. By studying the rumor control efforts made by thousands of accounts, we found that Twitter users respond and interact the most with tweets from verified Twitter accounts, and especially government organizations. Results on sourcing analysis show that the majority of Twitter users who utilize URLs in their post- ings are employing the information in the URLs to help debunk the false rumor. The most frequently cited information comes from news agencies when analyzing both URLs and domains. This paper provides novel insights into rumor control efforts made through social media during natural disasters and also the information sourcing and sharing behaviors that users exhibit during the debunking of false rumors.
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Seeing Should Probably not be Believing: The Role of Deceptive Support in COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter
With the spread of the SARS-CoV-2, enormous amounts of information about the pandemic are disseminated through social media platforms such as Twitter. Social media posts often leverage the trust readers have in prestigious news agencies and cite news articles as a way of gaining credibility. Nevertheless, it is not always the case that the cited article supports the claim made in the social media post. We present a cross-genre ad hoc pipeline to identify whether the information in a Twitter post (i.e., a “Tweet”) is indeed supported by the cited news article. Our approach is empirically based on a corpus of over 46.86 million Tweets and is divided into two tasks: (i) development of models to detect Tweets containing claim and worth to be fact-checked and (ii) verifying whether the claims made in a Tweet are supported by the newswire article it cites. Unlike previous studies that detect unsubstantiated information by post hoc analysis of the patterns of propagation, we seek to identify reliable support (or the lack of it) before the misinformation begins to spread. We discover that nearly half of the Tweets (43.4%) are not factual and hence not worth checking – a significant filter, given the sheer volume of social media posts on a platform such as Twitter. Moreover, we find that among the Tweets that contain a seemingly factual claim while citing a news article as supporting evidence, at least 1% are not actually supported by the cited news, and are hence misleading.
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- PAR ID:
- 10350369
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Data and Information Quality
- ISSN:
- 1936-1955
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Social media has been increasingly utilized to spread breaking news and risk communications during disasters of all magnitudes. Unfortunately, due to the unmoderated nature of social media platforms such as Twitter, rumors and misinformation are able to propagate widely. Given this, a surfeit of research has studied false rumor diffusion on Twitter, especially during natural disasters. Within this domain, studies have also focused on the misinformation control efforts from government organizations and other major agencies. A prodigious gap in research exists in studying the monitoring of misinformation on social media platforms in times of disasters and other crisis events. Such studies would offer organizations and agencies new tools and ideologies to monitor misinformation on platforms such as Twitter, and make informed decisions on whether or not to use their resources in order to debunk. In this work, we fill the research gap by developing a machine learning framework to predict the veracity of tweets that are spread during crisis events. The tweets are tracked based on the veracity of their content as either true, false, or neutral. We conduct four separate studies, and the results suggest that our framework is capable of tracking multiple cases of misinformation simultaneously, with scores exceeding 87%. In the case of tracking a single case of misinformation, our framework reaches an score of 83%. We collect and drive the algorithms with 15,952 misinformation‐related tweets from the Boston Marathon bombing (2013), Manchester Arena bombing (2017), Hurricane Harvey (2017), Hurricane Irma (2017), and the Hawaii ballistic missile false alert (2018). This article provides novel insights on how to efficiently monitor misinformation that is spread during disasters.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3546914
