Credibility in Context: An Analysis of Feature Distributions in Twitter

Twitter is a major forum for rapid dissemination of user-provided content in real time. As such, a large proportion of the information it contains is not particularly relevant to many users and in fact is perceived as unwanted 'noise' by many. There has been increased research interest in predicting whether tweets are relevant, newsworthy or credible, using a variety of models and methods. In this paper, we focus on an analysis that highlights the utility of the individual features in Twitter such as hashtags, retweets and mentions for predicting credibility. We first describe a context-based evaluation of the utility of a set of features for predicting manually provided credibility assessments on a corpus of microblog tweets. This is followed by an evaluation of the distribution/presence of each feature across 8 diverse crawls of tweet data. Last, an analysis of feature distribution across dyadic pairs of tweets and retweet chains of various lengths is described. Our results show that the best indicators of credibility include URLs, mentions, retweets and tweet length and that features occur more prominently in data describing emergency and unrest situations.