Truthy: mapping the spread of astroturf in microblog streams

  • Authors:
  • Jacob Ratkiewicz;Michael Conover;Mark Meiss;Bruno Gonçalves;Snehal Patil;Alessandro Flammini;Filippo Menczer

  • Affiliations:
  • Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We demonstrate a web service that tracks political memes in Twitter and helps detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We also present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Our web service is based on an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events.