Rumor Diffusion and Convergence during the 3.11 Earthquake: A Twitter Case Study

We focus on Internet rumors and present an empirical analysis and simulation results of their diffusion and convergence during emergencies. In particular, we study one rumor that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, which later turned out to be misinformation. By investigating whole Japanese tweets that were sent one week after the quake, we show that one correction tweet, which originated from a city hall account, diffused enormously. We also demonstrate a stochastic agent-based model, which is inspired by contagion model of epidemics SIR, can reproduce observed rumor dynamics. Our model can estimate the rumor infection rate as well as the number of people who still believe in the rumor that cannot be observed directly. For applications, rumor diffusion sizes can be estimated in various scenarios by combining our model with the real data.

[1]  D. Marquardt.  An Algorithm for Least-Squares Estimation of Nonlinear Parameters , 1963 .

[2]  Philip Treleaven,et al.  Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr , 2013, Scientific Reports.

[3]  D. Kendall,et al.  Epidemics and Rumours , 1964, Nature.

[4]  W. O. Kermack,et al.  Contributions to the mathematical theory of epidemics—I , 1991, Bulletin of mathematical biology.

[5]  Hui Zhang,et al.  Modeling the effects of social impact on epidemic spreading in complex networks , 2011 .

[6]  Yutaka Matsuo,et al.  Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors , 2010, WWW '10.

[7]  Carlo Piccardi,et al.  Inefficient epidemic spreading in scale-free networks. , 2008, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[8]  Leysia Palen,et al.  Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information , 2010, CSCW '10.

[9]  Filippo Menczer,et al.  The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network , 2013, PloS one.

[10]  Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.  The predictive power of online chatter , 2005, KDD '05.

[11]  WILLIAM GOFFMAN,et al.  Generalization of Epidemic Theory: An Application to the Transmission of Ideas , 1964, Nature.

[12]  John H. Gerdes,et al.  Using web-based search data to predict macroeconomic statistics , 2005, CACM.

[13]  Jeremy Ginsberg,et al.  Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data , 2009, Nature.

[14]  Daniel P. Maki,et al.  Mathematical models and applications : with emphasis on the social, life, and management sciences , 1973 .

[15]  W. O. Kermack,et al.  A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics , 1927 .

[16]  Duncan J Watts,et al.  A simple model of global cascades on random networks , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  Alessandro Vespignani,et al.  Absence of epidemic threshold in scale-free networks with degree correlations. , 2002, Physical review letters.

[18]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Predicting Disease Transmission from Geo-Tagged Micro-Blog Data , 2012, AAAI.

[19]  Nicholas DiFonzo,et al.  Rumour research can douse digital wildfires , 2013, Nature.

[20]  Ljupco Kocarev,et al.  Model for rumor spreading over networks. , 2010, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[21]  David M. Pennock,et al.  Predicting consumer behavior with Web search , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[22]  Víctor M Eguíluz,et al.  Epidemic threshold in structured scale-free networks. , 2002, Physical review letters.

[23]  Filippo Menczer,et al.  The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street , 2013, PloS one.

[24]  Duanbing Chen,et al.  The small world yields the most effective information spreading , 2011, ArXiv.

[25]  Brendan T. O'Connor,et al.  From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series , 2010, ICWSM.

[26]  Yamir Moreno,et al.  The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network , 2011, Scientific reports.

[27]  R. H. Knapp,et al.  A PSYCHOLOGY OF RUMOR , 1944 .