Enquiring Minds: Early Detection of Rumors in Social Media from Enquiry Posts

A rumour detection system that flags early postings with uncertain veracity can warn users that the information may be false.

“A rumour detection system that identifies, in its early stages, postings whose veracity status is uncertain, can be effectively used to warn users that the information in them may turn out to be false”

The first work to tackle detection of new rumours was by Zhao et al. (2015).

“The first work that tackled the detection of new rumours is that by Zhao et al. (2015).”

Zhao et al.'s approach assumes rumours provoke tweets from skeptical users questioning veracity; a piece of information with enquiring tweets is then considered rumourous.

“Their approach builds on the assumption that rumours will provoke tweets from skeptic users who question or enquire about their veracity; the fact that a piece of information has a number of enquiring tweets associated would then imply that the information is rumourous.”

Zhao et al. could not evaluate by recall and instead evaluated only by precision.

“It was not viable for them to evaluate by recall, and instead only evaluated by precision.”

Zhao et al. created a manually curated list of five regular expressions to identify enquiring tweets, clustered them by similarity, and deemed each cluster a candidate rumour.

“The authors created a manually curated list of five regular expressions (e.g.,”

Recent research shows that using context and interactions can help in determining whether a social media post reports a rumour.

“Recent research shows that the use of context (Zubiaga et al. 2017) and interactions (Zhao et al. 2015) can be of help”

Individual rumors are debunked in due time by fact-checking measures, but public perception about anthropogenic climate change has remained controversial for a long time.

“Individual rumors are being debunked in due time by fact checking measures (Zhao et al., 2015;Ciampaglia et al., 2015), however, public perception about some issues like human induced (anthropogenic) climate change have remained controversial for a long time (Tvinnereim et al., 2017).”