A recent paper presented by researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IBM Research Labs and the University of Maryland found that it was possible to identify tweets containing fake Sandy images with up to 97 percent accuracy.
“Hence, in cases of crisis, people often retweet and propagate tweets that they find in Twitter search or trending topics, irrespective of whether they follow the user or not,” the researchers write. This dynamic of out-of-graph retweets helps things spread rapidly, and it also illustrates how during breaking news events, social search can become more important than one’s social graph.
Another related piece of data in the paper is that fake images did not begin to spread rapidly until roughly 12 hours after they were first introduced on Twitter. The researchers note that “the sudden spike in their propagation via retweets happened only because of a few users.” So a fake will lay dormant until someone with the ability to amplify it comes along and retweets it. That’s what the fakers rely on, in fact.
Read more at Poynter
