Truthy: mapping the spread of astroturf in microblog streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We demonstrate a web service that tracks political memes in Twitter and helps detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We also present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Our web service is based on an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database applications—Data mining; H.3.4 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Systems and Software—Information networks; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: Mis...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Jacob Ratkiewicz, Michael Conover, Mark Meiss, Bruno Gonçalves, Snehal Patil, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Person-to-person Social Interaction, Social Media, Web Service, WWW 2011