Seminar: Readings in Social Computing Systems
Course project
Recently, several incidents have indicated that social media is being used to spread rumors (or unverified information). Microblogging services such as Twitter provide an excellent platform for rapid dissemination of information to a large population and such platforms are increasingly being exploited for spreading false information. Needless to say, spread of false information at large scale can lead to several undesired consequences. For example, during a natural disaster, false information can lead to wide spread panic among the general public and even interrupt disaster relief efforts by concerned authorities.
In this project, our goal is to (1) understand how rumors spread in microblogs, and (2) build tools to automatically detect rumors in microblogs. We will focus on the Twitter social network in this project. This project will be split into three stages:
- Stage 1: Collecting information about existing rumors to build a ground truth dataset
- Stage 2: Understanding propagation of rumors in Twitter
- Stage 3: Building tools to automatically detect rumors
Office hours
We will have office hours every Monday 9am-11am in Room 422 of E1 5 to discuss the course project.