Analysis of Structural Features in Rumor Conversations Detection in Twitter

Today, online social media with numerous users from ordinary citizens to top government officials, organizations, artists and celebrities, etc. is one of the most important platforms for sharing information and communication. These media provide users with quick and easy access to information so that the content of shared posts has the potential to reach millions of users in a matter of seconds. Twitter is one of the most popular and practical/used online social networks for spreading information, which, while being reliable, can also, be a source for spreading unrealistic and deceptive rumors as a result can have irreversible effects on individuals and society. Recently, several studies have been conducted in the field of rumor detection and verify using models based on deep learning and machine learning methods. Previous research into rumor detection has focused more on linguistic, user, and structural features. Concerning structural features, they examined the retweet propagation graph. However, in this study, unlike the previous studies, new structural features of the reply tree and user graph in extracting rumored conversations were extracted and analyzed from different aspects. In this study, the effectiveness of new structural features related to reply tree and user graph in detecting rumored conversations in Twitter events were evaluated from different aspects. First, the structural features of the reply tree and user graph were extracted at different time intervals, and important features in these intervals were identified using the Sequential Forward Selection approach. To evaluate the usefulness of valuable new structural features, these features have been compared with consideration of linguistic and user-specific features. Experiments have shown that combining new structural features with linguistic and user-specific features increases the accuracy of the rumor detection classification. Therefore, a rumor classification algorithm based on new structural, linguistic, and user-specific features in rumor conversation detection was proposed. This algorithm performs better than the basic methods and detects rumored conversations with greater accuracy. In addition, due to the importance of the source tweet user in conversations, this user was examined and analyzed from different aspects. The results showed that most rumored conversations were started by a small number of users. Rumors can be prevented by early identification of these users on Twitter events.