Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

We analyze the information credibility of news propagated through Twitter, a popular microblogging service. 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, often unintentionally.On this paper we focus on automatic methods for assessing the credibility of a given set of tweets. Specifically, we analyze microblog postings related to "trending" topics, and classify them as credible or not credible, based on features extracted from them. We use features from users' posting and re-posting ("re-tweeting") behavior, from the text of the posts, and from citations to external sources.We evaluate our methods using a significant number of human assessments about the credibility of items on a recent sample of Twitter postings. Our results shows that there are measurable differences in the way messages propagate, that can be used to classify them automatically as credible or not credible, with precision and recall in the range of 70% to 80%.

/pdf/information-credibility-on-twitter-2d1l7ckae1.pdf

Information credibility on twitter

Statistical Analysis With Missing Data (2nd ed.) (Book)

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion

This study analyzed the frequency and placement given to male and female sources and story subjects in news-paper coverage and their relationship to the gender of the reporter, A content analysis o...

The Influence of Reporter Gender on Source Selection in Newspaper Stories

This content analysis examined how Twitter is used as a content dissemination tool within the news industry. Using Gans’ conception of news values as a theoretical framework, this study looked at tweets of nine news organizations during a 4-month period to determine how individuals, links, news headlines and subject areas were employed within the 140-character limits. Results indicated that regional media tended to differ in Twitter usage from both local and national media and that broadcast news agencies were more likely to tweet multimedia packages than were print-based organizations. Crime and public affairs were the most tweeted topics. Implications of results were discussed.

Now Tweet This How News Organizations Use Twitter

This study examines how gender cues influence perceptions of credibility of informational blogs. Using 2 experiments for data collection, this study manipulated the gender descriptors of a Weblog authors and had participants rate the overall perceived credibility of 1 of 3 blog posts. Male authors were deemed more credible than female authors, and main effects were found for information seekers, who found the blogs more credible than noninformation seekers. Implications are discussed.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01448.x

Blogs of Information: How Gender Cues and Individual Motivations Influence Perceptions of Credibility

Based on uncertainty reduction theory, this paper argues that individuals were motivated to seek information and learn about the September 11 terrorist attacks to reduce uncertainty about what happened. Results from a panel survey indicate that negative emotional response was a strong predictor of efforts to learn. Analyses also show that relative increases in newspaper, television, and Internet use from Wave 1 to Wave 2 were positively related to efforts to learn about the attacks. The findings extend uncertainty reduction theory to the mass media context thereby contributing to our understanding of uses and gratifications.

Cory L. Armstrong

Papers

The Influence of Reporter Gender on Source Selection in Newspaper Stories

Now Tweet This How News Organizations Use Twitter

Blogs of Information: How Gender Cues and Individual Motivations Influence Perceptions of Credibility

Information Seeking and Emotional Reactions to the September 11 Terrorist Attacks

Providing a clearer view: An examination of transparency on local government websites