An experimental system for measuring the credibility of news content in Twitter

Abstract

Purpose: Owing to the large amount of information available on Twitter (a micro-blogging service) that is not necessarily true or believable, credibility of news published in such an electronic channel has becomean important area for investigation in the field of web credibility. This paper aimstoaddress this issue. Design/methodology/approach: A system was developed to measure the credibility of news content published in Twitter. The system uses two approaches toassign credibility levels (low, high and average) to each tweet. The first approach is based on the similarity between Twitter posts (tweets) and authentic (i.e. verified) news sources. The second approach is based on the similarity with verified news sources in addition to a set of proposed features. Findings: The evaluations of the two approaches showed that assigning credibility levels to Twitter tweets for the first approach has a higher precision and recall. Additional experiments showed that the linking feature has its impact on the second approach results. Research limitations/implications: The proposed system is experimental; thus further experiments are needed to prove these findings. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the research on web credibility. It is believed to be the first which provides a proposed system to evaluate the credibility of Twitter news content automatically. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.