Believe it or Not? Analyzing Information Credibility in Microblogs

—This paper identifies and evaluates key factors that influence credibility perception in microblogs. Specifically, we report on a demographic survey (N=81) followed by a user experiment (N=102) in order to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the important cues that contribute to information being perceived as credible? and (2) To what extent is such a quantification portable across different microblogging platforms? To answer the second question, we study two popular microblogs, Reddit and Twitter. Key results include that significant effects of individual factors can be isolated, are portable, and that metadata and image type elements are, in general, the strongest influencing factors in credibility assessments. Microblogs such as Twitter and Reddit are well established global sources of real-time news and information. As with all platforms that support user-provided content, they suffer from an abundance of noisy and unreliable data. With the emergence of m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASUNAM
• Authors: Byungkyu Kang, Tobias Höllerer, John O'Donovan
• Keywords: ASUNAM 2015, Social Networks