Crowdsourced Rumour Identification During Emergencies

When a significant event occurs, many social media users leverage platforms such as Twitter to track that event. Moreover, emergency response agencies are increasingly looking to social media as a source of real-time information about such events. However, false information and rumours are often spread during such events, which can influence public opinion and limit the usefulness of social media for emergency management. In this paper, we present an initial study into rumour identification during emergencies using crowdsourcing. In particular, through an analysis of three tweet datasets relating to emergency events from 2014, we propose a taxonomy of tweets relating to rumours. We then perform a crowdsourced labeling experiment to determine whether crowd assessors can identify rumour-related tweets and where such labeling can fail. Our results show that overall, agreement over the tweet labels produced were high (0.7634 Fleiss Kappa), indicating that crowd-based rumour labeling is possible. However, not all tweets are of equal difficulty to assess. Indeed, we show that tweets containing disputed/controversial information tend to be some of the most difficult to identify.