Health-related rumour detection on Twitter

In the last years social networks have emerged as a critical mean for information spreading. In spite of all the positive consequences this phenomenon brings, unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation, named as rumours, are becoming a potential threat to the society. Recently, there have been several studies on topic-independent rumour detection on Twitter. In this paper we present a novel rumour detection system which focuses on a specific topic, that is health-related rumours on Twitter. To this aim, we constructed a new subset of features including influence potential and network characteristics features. We tested our approach on a real dataset observing promising results, as it is able to correctly detect about 89% of rumours, with acceptable levels of precision.