News of Turkish airplane shooting down a Russian one over the Turkish-Syrian border has dominated the news and the social media lately. We investigated the rumor within hours after it appeared (24 Nov. 2015) and you can see the ressults of the analysis here: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/investigate.php?id=462776628

This was not the first time a rumor of this kind emerged. About a month and a half ago (10 Oct. 2015) an identical rumor had emerged. We had investigated that rumor too and you can see the results of our anaysis here: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/investigate.php?id=134661966

As you can see, based on the crowd’s reaction to the rumors, TwitterTrails was able to determine that the October rumor was false while the November one was true. The false rumor did not spread much and had a lot of skeptical tweets questioning its validity. On the other hand, the true rumor spread much higher and in terms of skepticism was undisputed.

Our understanding of the way the “wisdom of the crowd” works is that, when unbiased, emotionally cool observers see a rumor that seems suspicious, they usually react in one of two ways: They either do not retweet it, reducing its spread, or they may respond questioning the validity of the rumor, resulting in higher skepticism.

This is something we see often in the stories we investigate on TwitterTrails. Our understanding of the way the “wisdom of the crowd” works is that, when unbiased, emotionally cool observers see a rumor that seems suspicious, they usually react in one of two ways: They either not retweet it, reducing its spread, or they may respond questioning the validity of the rumor, resulting in higher skepticism.

When plotting the true and false rumors (after they have been verified through journalists’ work), the following image emerges:

It is not a 100% separation, but one can see that the false rumors (marked by red triangles) show low spread and high skepticism, while the true ones show high spread and low skepticism. The picture is of course muddled in the lower corner. A rumor that does not attract much attention did not have the opportunity to benefit from the “wisdom of the crowd” and thus cannot be determined by our system.