Twitter is the leading source of news, gossip, information, and misinformation for millions of people around the world. And if you follow the right accounts, you can be up to date with the latest happenings before the mainstream media have gotten their fact-checkers out of bed.
But how is information disseminated on Twitter and how can you judge its reliability?
Not everything you read on Twitter is trustworthy.
Twitter is the digital home of billions of people with diverse opinions, agendas, viewpoints, and motives. While you may want to share interesting facts and articles, others want to sow discord and falsehoods, or simply don’t care if what they are repeating is trustworthy or not.
Often the accounts are not run by people at all. Rather, they are bots: automated accounts programmed to increase the visibility of tweets with certain keywords or from other specific accounts.
In the seconds between reading an entertaining or informative tweet and clicking the button that will spread it to your own followers, it’s hard to judge whether you’re sharing a valuable resource or misinformation. Luckily, there is a tool that can help.
Hoaxy can help you visualize the origin of a tweet
false is a joint project between the Institute for Network Sciences at Indiana University (IUNI) and the Center for Research on Complex Networks and Systems (CNetS), and uses the Twitter search API to visualize the spread of information.
As its name suggests, Hoaxy was designed with disinformation in mind. In addition to showing the origin of particular tweets, the tool can indicate whether the retweets are (most likely) made by accounts operated by real people or are automated (bot) accounts.
You can write a query directly in Hoaxy or upload a set of keywords as a CSV or JSON file. Results are displayed as a graph and as an easy-to-understand color-coded diagram. You can even play animations to better judge the spread of information over time.
How to use Hoaxy to track information spread on Twitter
To use Hoaxy, you must log in to your Twitter account and authorize Hoaxy to use it. If you don’t already have one, it’s easy to create a Twitter account. Once you’re logged in, visit the Hoaxy home page and enter a search query in the text box.
Your query can be a word or phrase, such as “Happy New Year,” or it can be a link to an article. Alternatively, you can import data. The example given by Hoaxy to demonstrate how the search works is “vaccines”.
You can restrict your search to tweets in a particular language and use advanced search operators. For example, if you want tweets that mention “Christmas” or “Santa Claus”, you would enter “Christmas OR Santa Claus” (without the quotes). If you want to search for tweets written in response to the official MakeUseOf Twitter accountyou can add to: MUO_official.
As a first test for Hoaxy, we’ve pasted the URL of our article on how cheat.sh gives you access to the best Linux and programming cheat sheets.
As you can see in the image above, the screen is divided into two main sections. On the left, you can see the popularity of an article over time. Below this area is a flattened version of the same chart, which you can select and drag a time period of interest to get more accurate data.
The main section of the screen shows which accounts have tweeted or retweeted this article, with a line representing the links between the accounts. An arrow indicates which account the tweet or retweet originated from.
One of the coolest features of Hoaxy is that each account is color-coded based on how likely it is to be automated. A shade of blue indicates high confidence that the account is exhibiting typical human behavior, while red shows that the account is more bot-like.
At the center of our demo diagram is the MundoLinuxBot account, which retweeted the post five times. If you click on this account and press to update, you will see that Hoaxy gives MundoLinuxBot a bot score of 3.5 out of 5, and is 80% certain that MundoLinuxBot is an automated account. You will also see the names of the accounts from which MundoLinuxBot has retweeted this particular link.
Using the time selection tool, you can roll back the clock seven days from the date of your query and see that the first tweet mentioning this article was made by the account Wajeeha65827865, an account with a bot score of 4, 5/7, at 4:03 am on December 23, with MUO_official publishing the article 11 hours later.
You can see the map and account links expand by pressing the triangular play button in the center.
Hoaxy allows you to see the spread of information on Twitter
Using Hoaxy means you can see how information is first placed on Twitter and propagated between accounts. It can be a vital tool in combating potential misinformation and finding the true source of rumors.
But Hoaxy isn’t perfect and can never tell you with 100% certainty if information is true or false, or even if a particular account is a bot. You should use it with care and treat its output as indicative only. If you find malicious misinformation on Twitter, follow our guide to effectively countering it.