TipMaster: A knowledge base of authoritative local news sources on social media

Abstract

Twitter has become an important online source for realtime news dissemination. Especially, official accounts of local government and media outlets have provided newsworthy and authoritative information, revealing local trends and breaking news. In this paper, we describe TipMaster, an automatically constructed knowledge base of Twitter accounts that are likely to report local news, from government agencies to local media outlets. First, we implement classifiers for detecting these accounts by integrating heterogeneous information from the accounts' textual metadata, profile images, and their tweet messages. Next, we demonstrate two use cases for TipMaster: 1) as a platform that monitors real-time social media messages for local breaking news, and 2) as an authoritative source for verifying nascent rumors. Experimental results show that our account classification algorithms achieve both high precision and recall (around 90%). The demonstrated case studies prove that our platform is able to detect local breaking news or debunk emergent rumors faster than mainstream media sources.