User perception of information credibility of news on twitter

Abstract

In this paper, we examine user perception of credibility for news-related tweets. We conduct a user study on a crowd-sourcing platform to judge the credibility of such tweets. By analysing user judgments and comments, we find that eight features, including some that can not be automatically identified from tweets, are perceived by users as important for judging information credibility. Moreover, distinct features like link in tweet, display name and user belief consistently lead users to judge tweets as credible. We also find that users can not consistently judge or even misjudge the credibility for some tweets on politics news. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.