Are Rumors Always False?: Understanding Rumors Across Domains, Queries, and Ratings

Rumors are increasingly becoming a critical issue on theWeb threatening democracy, economics, and society on a global scale. With the advance of social media networks, people are sharing content in an unprecedented scale. This makes social platforms such as microblogs an ideal place for spreading rumors. Although rumors may have a severe impact in the real world, there is not enough large-scale study regarding the characteristics of rumors. In this paper, by studying more than 1000 rumors with over 4 million tweets from about 3 million users, we aim to provide several insights in order to understand the distribution, correlation, and propagation of rumors, especially user behaviors, spatial and temporal characteristics. All the rumor data are publicly available.

Automated summary

This paper studies over 1000 rumors, including over 4 million tweets from about 3 million users. Through this research, we aim to gain a better understanding of the distribution, correlation, and propagation characteristics of rumors, as well as user behaviors and spatial-temporal characteristics.