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

Abstract

Rumors are increasingly becoming a critical issue on the Web 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.