Misinformation on Social Media: Network Analysis

Presenter(s)

Proteeti Sinha

Abstract or Description

To learn about more recent political conspiracy theories, our research project tracked another false theory that arose during the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, called “Stop the Steal.” For our project, we collected Twitter data about this  conspiracy theory. Our primary goal was to learn how it was talked about on the social media network, and among whom. Toward this goal, we developed a machine learning model to automatically label the Twitter data that we collected. Once labeled, we constructed a network graph of the data to characterize the overlap between users who participated in different threads about the theories. In addition, we analyzed the public metrics for the tweets, such as likes, retweets, and quotes to understand how much engagement each tweet and conversation received. One of our contributions was developing a system that allows users to collect information about tweets using the Twitter API, and build a network graph that describes the information.

Mentor

Sara Kingsley