Tweeting is Believing? Understanding Microblog Credibility Perceptions (2012) Morris et al

Twitter is becoming increasingly used to disseminate breaking news as well as share ideas and opinions in a public sphere. This means there is greater importance placed upon the credibility of tweets, how objectively ‘true’ the content is, and how users ascertain these factors. In addition to this, users are now becoming more likely to access tweets through the ‘search’ option, and therefore have less information to base credibility judgments on. The authors found a disparity in which features determined how ‘true’ a user found a tweet to be, and the credibility assessment that search engines provided.

The authors conducted a study in which they watched Twitter users ‘thinking aloud’ while searching on Twitter. Meanwhile, the experimenters noted the features that the participants paid attention to whilst evaluating the Twitter search results. It was concluded that users found it challenging to ascertain how ‘truthful’ a tweet was, and usually based judgments on heuristics (so, had an item been retweeted?) or systematic biases (such as ‘professional’ avatar pictures). It is suggested that in order to appear credible, authors should avoid using the Twitter default photo, and, if tweeting on a specific topic, choose a username which infers a a strong correlation with the topic in hand.

In a world where anyone can upload information onto a shared platform such as Twitter, it is important to understand what is deemed credible and truthful by those who consume it. Most of us are constantly seeking to increase our knowledge on a multitude of topics and often unable to distinguish that which is true and false.

There is merit in studying how people understand and react to things they see on social networks. However, there have been certain parties that have benefited most from the emergence of this field of research, and they are users who share false information. By creating multiple accounts, or interacting with people with similar interests, users can increase their retweet count, and therefore, credibility of their posts. This, combined with an ‘official’ sounding username, would allow the easy sharing of false information to a user base measuring in the hundreds of millions.

The paper I identified regarding Twitter and whether we can trust what we RT is here.