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Twitter under crisis: can we trust what we RT?

Published: 25 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this article we explore the behavior of Twitter users under an emergency situation. In particular, we analyze the activity related to the 2010 earthquake in Chile and characterize Twitter in the hours and days following this disaster. Furthermore, we perform a preliminary study of certain social phenomenons, such as the dissemination of false rumors and confirmed news. We analyze how this information propagated through the Twitter network, with the purpose of assessing the reliability of Twitter as an information source under extreme circumstances. Our analysis shows that the propagation of tweets that correspond to rumors differs from tweets that spread news because rumors tend to be questioned more than news by the Twitter community. This result shows that it is posible to detect rumors by using aggregate analysis on tweets.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SOMA '10: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics
    July 2010
    145 pages
    ISBN:9781450302173
    DOI:10.1145/1964858
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    Published: 25 July 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. Twitter
    2. rumor identification
    3. social media analytics

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    • (2025)Study on the model of factors influencing users’ willingness to participate in misinformation purification on the Weibo platformAslib Journal of Information Management10.1108/AJIM-07-2024-0541Online publication date: 18-Feb-2025
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