In this paper we analyze the information propagated through three social networks. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors. In this paper we focus on the search for automatic methods for assessing the relevance of a given set of posts. We first retrieved from social networks, posts related to trending topics. Then, we categorize them as being news or as being conversational messages, and assessed their credibility. From the gained insights we used features to automatically assess whether a post is news or chat, and to level its credibility. Based on these two experiments we built an automatic classifier. The results from assessing our classifier, which categorizes posts as being relevant or not, lead to a high balanced accuracy, with the potential to be further enhanced.

Social networks are becoming a wide repository of information, some of which may be of interest for general audiences. In this study we investigate which features may be extracted from single posts propagated throughout a social network, and that are indicative of its relevance, from a journalistic perspective. We then test these features with a set of supervised learning algorithms in order to evaluate our hypothesis. The main results indicate that if a text fragment is pointed out as being interesting, meaningful for the majority of people, reliable and with a wide scope, then it is more likely to be considered as relevant. This approach also presents promising results when validated with several well-known learning algorithms.

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