Credibility Assessment In Weibo: Theoretical Framework And Visualization Tool

As one representative of new media, Weibo has been playing a more and more important role in people’s daily life. Whilst it speeds up the spreading of real-time information, it also reduces the spreading costs of rumors and untrue information. Therefore, the information credibility problem in Weibo deserves growing concerns. With an overall analysis of previous studies on the topic of information credibility in social media, this paper summarized six characteristics and proposed a preliminary model of how people assess information credibility in Weibo. To investigate the process through which people make credibility judgments, a focus group study consisting of 30 participants was performed. The results confirmed several assumptions in the preliminary model, as well as yielded three influencing factors(original author, original text, spreading network) and seven influencing sub-factors(authencity, authority, influence, reasonableness, wording, repost author credibility, and repost text credibility). Details of the modified model were then enriched with the result from a survery of 262 participants in regards to the overall information credibility in Weibo, the relationship between news or health information credibility and three factors and seven sub-factors, and the relationship between each factor and its sub-features. Last, a visualization tool to help people better assess information credibility in Weibo was designed and developed as a plug-in for the Chrome browser. It utilized the open API from Sina Weibo and visualized credibility clues from two aspects, the spreading network and the timeline. The data was retrieved, processed, visualized and injected into the browser. With a laboratory experiment of 20 subjects, the tool was tested to significantly improve people’s credibility assessment and the confidence when making the judgement.