Detecting event rumors on Sina Weibo automatically

Abstract

Sina Weibo has become one of the most popular social networks in China. In the meantime, it also becomes a good place to spread various spams. Unlike previous studies on detecting spams such as ads, pornographic messages and phishing, we focus on identifying event rumors (rumors about social events), which are more harmful than other kinds of spams especially in China. To detect event rumors from enormous posts, we studied the characteristics of event rumors and extracted features which can distinguish rumors from ordinary posts. The experiments conducted on real dataset show that the new features are effective to improve the rumor classifier. Further analysis of the event rumors reveals that they can be classified into 4 different types. We propose an approach for detecting one major type, text-picture unmatched event rumors. The experiment demonstrates that this approach is well-performed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.