On Twitter, claims that receive higher skepticism and lower spread scores are more likely to be false.
On the other hand, claims that receive lower skepticism and higher spread scores are more likely to be true.
The above is a conjecture we wrote in a recent paper entitled Investigating Rumor Propagation with TwitterTrails (currently under review). Feel free to take a look if you want to know more details about our system, but we will write here some of its highlights.
As you may know if you have read our Twitter Trails Blog before, we are developing a Web service that, starting from a tweet or a set of keywords related to a story spreading on Twitter (or a hashtag), it will investigate it and answer automatically some of the basic questions regarding the story. If you are not familiar, you may want to take a look at some of the posts. Or, it can wait until you read this one.
Recently we deployed twittertrails.com a site containing the growing collection of stories and rumors that we investigate. Its front end looks like this:
This is the “condensed view” which allocates one line per story, 20 stories per page. There are over 120 stories collected at this point. Clicking on a title brings you the investigation page with lots of details and visualizations about its spread, its originator, how it burst, who supports it and who refutes it.