Automatic detection of rumoured tweets and finding its origin

The number of people using social networking sites such as Twitter is exponentially increasing every day. These sites not only act as a platform for staying connected with friends and exchanging opinions and ideologies, but also help to share and disseminate information. Important events in the real world cause a huge flood of tweets on Twitter. During many such events, Twitter has been used to spread rumours and cause havoc and panic among the people, thus worsening the situation. In this project, we try to automatically detect the rumours spreading on Twitter and identify its source. Using some of the rumoured tweets posted during the London Riots in 2011 and some non-rumoured tweets, we trained a classifier. Our classifier correctly classifies the tweets with high accuracy. We show that, in rumour detection, the information propagated by the user becomes more important than the identity of the user by showing that tweet-based features play a much higher and significant role than user-based features. We propose an algorithm to find the origin of the rumoured tweets i.e. obtain the account information of the user who first started spreading rumours on Twitter.