A study on spread pattern of online social networks rumour

• Main Author: Yang, Chenyan
• Other Authors: Yeo Chai Kiat
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70419
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project studies the spread pattern of verified rumours on online social media networks. The project is scoped to the Twitter social media platform for the aim of characterizing and summarizing significant features of well spread rumours. There have been significant challenges throughout this project. The difficulty lies in the massive computational needs to perform retrieval and data processing of the large volume of tweets. Other challenges include but are not limited to the rarity of finding a meaningful, believable rumours which has impeded the analysis process of this project. The methodology for characterising spread patterns of rumours starts by mass data collection via Twitter API. This was done with a custom script and the source is included together with this report. The next stage of the process is to perform user analysis to find the correlation between user actions and the spread patterns. This is then followed by performing semantic analysis on tweet replies to find the general mood of the users. Finally, data aggregation is done to draw statistical meaning. It can be concluded from this project that there are indeed specific features that can be observed from the spread pattern of rumours.