Rumor Identification in Microblogging Systems Based on Users’ Behavior

In recent years, microblog systems such as Twitter and Sina Weibo have averaged multimillion active users. On the other hand, the microblog system has become a new means of rumor-spreading platform. In this paper, we investigate the machine-learning-based rumor identification approaches. We observed that feature design and selection has a stronger impact on the rumor identification accuracy than the selection of machine-learning algorithms. Meanwhile, the rumor publishers' behavior may diverge from normal users', and a rumor post may have different responses from a normal post. However, mass behavior on rumor posts has not been explored adequately. Hence, we investigate rumor identification schemes by applying five new features based on users' behaviors, and combine the new features with the existing well-proved effective user behavior-based features, such as followers' comments and reposting, to predict whether a microblog post is a rumor. Experiment results on real-world data from Sina Weibo demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed method and features. From the experiments, we conclude that the rumor detection based on mass behaviors is more effective than the detection based on microblogs' inherent features.