Credibility and Dynamics of Collective Attention
This addresses the problem of misinformation on social media for users and platforms by linking attention patterns to credibility, though it is incremental in building on existing research.
The study analyzed 47 million Twitter messages across 1,138 real-world events to investigate how collective attention dynamics relate to perceived credibility, finding that events with sustained, intermittent bursts of attention were associated with lower credibility levels.
Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these platforms, often raising questions of veracity and credibility of the reported information. Here we ask: How do the dynamics of collective attention directed toward an event reported on social media vary with its perceived credibility? By examining the first large-scale, systematically tracked credibility database of public Twitter messages (47M messages corresponding to 1,138 real-world events over a span of three months), we established a relationship between the temporal dynamics of events reported on social media and their associated level of credibility judgments. Representing collective attention by the aggregate temporal signatures of an event reportage, we found that the amount of continued attention focused on an event provides information about its associated levels of perceived credibility. Events exhibiting sustained, intermittent bursts of attention were found to be associated with lower levels of perceived credibility. In other words, as more people showed interest during moments of transient collective attention, the associated uncertainty surrounding these events also increased.