Monthly Archives: September 2014

Plane in the Sea Near Canary Islands

rafaleonortega
The tweet posted by @rafaleonortega about a plane in the sea (click to go to the tweet).

On March 27, 2014, at 10:53 AM, @rafaleonortega tweeted “Imagen del avión en el mar en estos momentos en Telde, Gran Canaria,” or, in English, “There is a plane in the sea right now in Telde, Canary Islands.” This immediately incited panic (occurring  only a few weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared), and thousands of users began posting about the plane in the sea on Twitter. But did a plane land in the water off the coast of the Canary Islands? We can use the Trails system to help answer that question.

Explore this story with the Trails system!

Continue reading Plane in the Sea Near Canary Islands

Oregon High School Shooting

To describe how the Trails system works, we will go over the propagation of a recent story:

On June 10, 2014, @cnnbrk posted the tweet shown below, reporting a shooting in an Oregon high school.

Shooter killed student at Oregon's Reynolds High School this morning, police say. Shooter also dead. cnn.it/1jiGpo

Coming from a source like CNN (and a verified Twitter account), we expect this story to be true.  Will we use the Trails tool to investigate it further: possibly, to back up our assumption that it is true, and also to see how it spread on Twitter and which users influenced the discussion.

Explore this story with the Trails system!

Continue reading Oregon High School Shooting

Welcome to the TRAILS Blog!

Welcome! Glad you found us!

This blog is written by the TRAILS research team at Wellesley. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the use of the TRAILS system that is tracking the ways that tweets propagate.

Why did we built TRAILS? Glad you asked!

Social media have become part of modern news reporting, whether it is being used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a medium by citizen reporters. The quest for prominence and recognition on websites like Twitter can sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. As a way to study and react to this trend, we introduce TRAILS, an interactive, web-based tool that allows users to investigate the origin and propagation characteristics of a rumor and its denial, if any, on Twitter.

The TRAILS system is composed of a collection of data analysis and visualization tools and provide answers to several questions related to propagation of a rumor on Twitter, including:

  • Originator: Who posted the information first?
  • Burst: When and how did the story break?
  • Timeline: Is the story still spreading at the time of the inquiry?
  • Propagators: Who has been retweeting and spreading the story, given the retweets often indicate agreement?
  • Negation: Were there any related denying stories competing for attention?
  • Main actors: Who were the main actors in the propagation, according to the Twitter audience?

While we envision that TRAILS would be valuable as a tool for individual use, in the initial stages we see it as a tool for amateur and professional journalists investigating recent and breaking stories.

Next, please take a look at individual rumors we have analyzed. We aim to use these initial stories to help people understand how TRAILS work.

Are you ready to explore Trails yourself?  

If you have any questions regarding the TRAILS project, please contact pmetaxas@wellesley.edu.