The rise of social media has turned it into a source of basic news for many people; even Twitter's character limit allows for a brief description of a newsworthy event, along with a link to more details. However, the ease of creating and sharing information through social networks has also raised concerns about how easily they can be used to spread misinformation, either accidentally or with intent. Some researchers at Yahoo have tracked the spread of news (reliable and otherwise) through Twitter, and found that it's possible to create an automated system that identifies newsworthy events and judges their reliability with an accuracy of nearly 90 percent.
The authors (who are based in Barcelona and Chile—working for Yahoo might not be all bad news) note that assessing credibility is not simply an academic exercise, as a hacked Twitter account produced a fake tsunami warning last year. A lot of people aren't very good at it, and the lack of easy indications of credibility online lead readers to focus on irrelevant items, like the visual design of a source's webpage. Tweets, which often contain little more than an icon associated with a source, would seem to make matters even more challenging.
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Diora Baird Laura Prepon Ashley Scott Michelle Behennah Julie Benz
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