How Scientists Can Tell if Your Tweets are Truthful

There ’s a band of noise and very little signaling on Twitter , and sometimes it can be heavy to know what to pay attending to . A team of scientists might be able to help with that , though , because they ’re developing algorithms tosort the truthful tweetsfrom the lie .

Slate report new research , due to be published in the journalInternet Researchnext month , which utilize a series of tests to promise whether tweet are unfeigned or otherwise . It looks for obvious clues which humans spot instinctively : messages are more likely to be reliable if they descend from a well - follow source , are longer , or contain universal resource locator , for illustration . lyric is authoritative , too : question marks , exclamation marks , and first- or third - someone pronouns all hint that a tweet should n’t be trusted .

Roll that all together , and the researchers — Carlos Castillo , Marcelo Mendoza , and Barbara Poblete — havedeveloped an algorithmthat can tell if a tweet ’s truthful 86 percentage of the time . That ’s not a consummate 100 , but it ’s a deuced sight better than a 50 - 50 guessing . Of course , a human could perhaps do better right now , but the algorithm can crunch through flock of tweet in moment . Perhaps Twitter guest should do with an optional truth filter soon ? [ SlateviaVerge ]

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