Twitter: meta-features like the number of followers of the author, the count of tweets produced and the ratio of tweet number and days since account creation affect credibility judgments

The Impact of Twitter Features on Credibility Ratings-An Explorative Examination Combining Psychological Measurements and Feature Based Selection Methods. Judith Meinert, Ahmet Aker, Nicole C. Krämer. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Jan 2019. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/59698/0258.pdf

Abstract: In a post-truth age determined by Social Media channels providing large amounts of information of questionable credibility while at the same time people increasingly tend to rely on online information, the ability to detect whether content is believable is developing into an important challenge. Most of the work in that field suggested automated approaches to perform binary classification to determine information veracity. Recipients ́ perspectives and multidimensional psychological credibility measurements have rarely been considered. To fill this gap and gain more insights into the impact of a tweet ́s features on perceived credibility, we conducted a survey asking participants (N=2626) to rate the credibility of crisis-related tweets. The resulting 24.823 ratings were used for an explorative feature selection analysis revealing that mostly meta-related features like the number of followers of the author, the count of tweets produced and the ratio of tweet number and days since account creation affect credibility judgments.