Category Archives: Case Studies

Blog posts highlighting unique, interesting or meaningful stories created with TwitterTrails.

Evidence of pizzagate conspiracy theory on TwitterTrails

May 9, 2017"fake news", Case Studies, conspiracy theory, Elections, SpammersPanagiotis Metaxas

Many things have been written about the infamous #pizzagate conspiracy theory (“scandal” for those who believed in it) and, we are sure, much more will be written in the future. The fact that the outrageous and sick imagination of a few online trolls was able to persuade thousands of people that it was real, and motivate one of them to walk into the Comet Pizza with a loaded gun will be a matter of study of many Psychologists, Sociologists, and Political Scientists. Given that in a few days a workshop will be held in Montreal on Digital Misinformation, we thought that this would be a good time to share some notes of a TwitterTrails story we did.

On December 2, 2016, we did a TwitterTrails investigation collecting Twitter data that contained the hashtag #pizzagate and we present here a few interesting observations about how it spread, who used it first and what were the shape of the community that engaged in the spreading until that time. Below are some of our findings. You can always explore the TwitterTrails story on your own.

Who used the hashtag #pizzagate first?

According to our data, the first mention of #pizzagate was at 8:34 AM GMT on Nov. 6, 2016, two days before the US elections. While the vast majority of people in the US were sleeping, the tweet was sent by a troll that has promoted tens of thousands of provocative lies to its 2 thousand followers. Most of the followers are certainly bots designed to infiltrate online groups willing to believe them — in this case Trump supporters.

If you want to know more about how trolls and spammers are successful in promoting lies, take a look at The Real “Fake News” post by Prof. Eni Mustafaraj.

Who made #pizzagate widely known?

The propagation graph below shows who were the main propagators of a rumor when its activity showed its first “burst”.

Clicking on the (partially covered) purple data point in the upper right corner we find that, surprisingly, the first tweet that had over 3000 retweets belongs to a pro-Erdogan Turkish journalist! According to The Daily Dot columnist Efe Sozeri, at that time, Turkey was outraged by a child abuse scandal and from controversial pending legislation on child marriage and governmental sources were trying to show that their scandal was minor compared to the US scandal.

But who informed the Turkish journalist about pizzagate? The propagation graph has some evidence that he was informed by a barrage of tweets that occur a few hours before his posting. The colorful column of data points just before his tweets are by a troll that sending dozens of tweets in Turkish. Here are a few of them as recorded in TwitterTrails:

A deafening echo chamber

The twitter exchange related to the pizzagate co-retweeted graph shows a dense echo chamber that is just verifying to its participants the validity of the conspiracy and allows no doubt to emerge:

This is the densest echo chamber we have observed on TwitterTrails. Among the 22,000 accounts posting about pizzagate, 4528 of them have risen to prominence being retweeted by at least two other accounts over a million times! Looking at the word cloud that characterizes the cyan group of 4474 participants, we see that the most common words in their profile are #maga, trump, truth [sic], love, god conservative.

How different is this graph from other graphs of political discourse? For comparison, we show what a typical co-retweeted network looks like when discussing political issues. Below is the graph related to the 2016 vice-presidential debate:

In this graph, you can see the two communities, their polarization, and the partial overlap as people read both sides but prefer one of them.

What else can we find?

These are just some of the insights that TwitterTrails can offer to a journalist or anyone who might want to study the propagation of a rumor. If you want to study it further, use TwitterTrails story of the hashtag #pizzagate and send us a comment!

False and True rumors look very differently on TwitterTrails

November 26, 2015About TwitterTrails, Case Studies, False Claims, True ClaimsPanagiotis Metaxas

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.

Continue reading False and True rumors look very differently on TwitterTrails →

Global warming denialists make lousy spammers

November 9, 2015Case Studiesspammers, time series graphSamantha Finn

TwitterTrails is a system focused on studying how rumors and memes spread online, but it can also track efforts by spammers to promote spam messages on Twitter. In one such case, which we observed recently, global warming denialists online misrepresented an article posted by NASA to claim that NASA’s article effectively denies the existence of global warming. TwitterTrails discovered their effort and identified 115 of these denialists. Here’s what happened:

On October 30th, 2015, NASA posted an article about a study showing that the amount of ice in the Antarctic ice sheet has increased overall. They tweeted about the article, summarizing it with: “Antarctica is overall accumulating ice, but parts have increased ice loss in last decades.”

Several news websites posted articles about the study which were widely shared on Twitter expressing overall skepticism about both the findings and their implications for global warming:

What Antarctica’s Incredible “Growing” Icepack Really Means by National Geographic
A controversial NASA study says Antarctica is gaining ice. Here’s why you should be skeptical by the Washington Post
Is Antarctica Gaining or Losing Ice? Hint: Losing. by Slate

However, the link shared by far the most on Twitter a website called “The Real Strategy” which takes a very different spin on the NASA study:

NASA Debunked Global Warming Hoax in Study

You will not hear this on your mainstream “News” channels… A new study by NASA has proven that the global warming hoax is a myth, once and for all.

A study released by NASA on October 30 says that the amount of ice in the poles has increased steadily over the last several decades. What happened to Al Gore’s claim that the poles would be melted completely by this year? Obama was just filmed claiming that “Global Warming” is proven… How stupid are their audiences really? Has everyone been programmed to just accept what these liars tell them as gospel? This study proves that “Global Warming” is so bogus that the world is actually COOLING!

The story continues on to quote the NASA article at length to support its claim that climate change is a “hoax”. This story received widespread air time on Twitter; nearly 4,000 of the 8,700 tweets we collected in reference to the NASA article included a link to “The Real Strategy,” compared to just a few hundred links to other relevant articles (including NASA’s original).

So, does Twitter audience believe that NASA’s own study disproves global warming? Not quite.

Continue reading Global warming denialists make lousy spammers →

Twitter’s increasing doubts about the Germanwings cell phone video

April 6, 2015Case Studies, False ClaimsSamantha Finn

On March 31, 2015, at around 1 PM eastern time (9 PM in Germany), German news outlet Bild posted an article claiming they had received a cell phone video of the final moments of the Germanwings flight, which was crashed by the co-pilot in the French Alps. Bild writes (in their English translation):

Paris – A video emerged from on-board Germanwings flight 4U9525. German newspaper BILD and French magazine „Paris Match“ were able to view it.

– Video shows last seconds of death flight 4U9525, BILD

Paris Match, the French magazine which also claimed to see the video, describes it (from their English translation):

Its origin – a cell phone – was clear. The scene was so chaotic that it was hard to identify people, but the sounds of the screaming passengers made it perfectly clear that they were aware of what was about to happen to them. One can hear cries of “My God” in several languages. Metallic banging can also be heard more than three times, perhaps of the pilot trying to open the cockpit door with a heavy object. Towards the end, after a heavy shake, stronger than the others, the screaming intensifies. Then nothing.

– EXCLUSIVE: THE FINAL MOMENTS BEFORE THE CRASH, Paris Match

Neither organization posted the video, but rather descriptions of what the video showed.

When @cnnbrk posted the story, it was retweeted over 500 times, and the conversation began to pick up steam on Twitter. However, not all Twitter users were convinced, even before reports began to spread that French officials were denying the existence of this video. Continue reading to learn about how TwitterTrails allows users to trace the increasing doubt about the Germanwings cell phone video.

Continue reading Twitter’s increasing doubts about the Germanwings cell phone video →

Two Police Officers shot during Ferguson Protests: Observations through TwitterTrails

March 18, 2015Case Studiesco-retweeted network, ferguson, propagation graph, time series graphSamantha Finn

The Ferguson police chief resigned on March 11th, 2015, following the Justice Department’s report about systematic bias in the Ferguson police department. This prompted protests outside the police department, during which two police officers were shot and wounded.

Using TwitterTrails, we investigated this claim the following morning, about 10 hours after the shooting, and repeated the data collection twice over the next 12 hours to get a larger dataset. We find that, even though we did not collect data live during the event, TwitterTrails can still reconstruct an interesting and meaningful account of the reporting on Twitter. We capture not only traditional news media reporting, but also first hand accounts written by people on the scene of the protest (which contain information that is less visible in tweets written by the news media). Finally, we find a very polarized audience taking to Twitter to discuss the shooting, as captured by the co-retweeted network.

The Co-Retweeted network, capturing a very polarized audience discussing the shooting of two Ferguson police officers during a protest in the early hours of March 12th, 2015.

Read on for our observations, or view the story for yourself on TwitterTrails.

Continue reading Two Police Officers shot during Ferguson Protests: Observations through TwitterTrails →

According to the crowd, Putin’s motorcade shape was a hoax

November 19, 2014Case Studies, False ClaimsPanagiotis Metaxas

Twittertrails is studying the propagation of rumors on Twitter. It will give you evidence about how the Twitter audience reacts to a rumor and whether the audience believes the rumor is a hoax or not. Its method of measuring the skepticism of the audience is a little more sophisticated than counting retweets, however. In fact, the rumor may get a huge head start, almost 11,000 retweets, but if they all came from the same source, they will not count as much on the skepticism level.

Let us demonstrate the skepticism level with an example. The twittertrails.com user asks the system to retrieve all tweets containing the terms “putin motorcade”, and the rest are computed automatically in a few minutes.

The “Putin Motorcade Shape” Story

A few days ago, a funny rumor appeared, that Putin’s motorcade was shaped as, well, you’ll see in the accompanying picture:

The originating tweet who broke the story received almost 11,000 retweets! One of the reasons for that amazing count that any marketer would love, was that the account owner is a member of several groups with different political, ethnic and financial identities. Looking into the timeline graph, however, one can see that he was not the first to write about it. The first relevant tweet came several days before his post, by an Ukranian Euromaidan account.

Continue reading According to the crowd, Putin’s motorcade shape was a hoax →

Girl Shoots Gun Instructor

October 16, 2014Case Studies, True ClaimsSamantha Finn

On August 25th, 2014, a 9 year old girl accidentally shot and killed her gun instructor while learning how to fire an Uzi. It sounds outrageous enough to be a hoax–an article from the Onion–but various high profile news media outlets confirm the tragic shooting, which captures international attention for days following the incident.

Investigating this story using the Trails system reveals what we would expect to see from a true story: dozens of verified accounts tweeting about it, receiving hundreds of retweets. However, we also find a persistent though low profile attempt on Twitter to disprove this story. In this post, we study the emergence of a spam-like conspiracy theory surrounding the accidental shooting.

Explore this story on TwitterTrails, or read on for our observations. Continue reading Girl Shoots Gun Instructor →

Plane in the Sea Near Canary Islands

September 17, 2014Case Studies, False Claimsbruffin

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

September 17, 2014Case Studies, True Claimspropagation graph, retweet network, spammersbruffin

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.

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.