IISE 2019 conference & expo a multi-algorithm approach for classifying misinformed Twitter data during crisis events

Social media is being increasingly utilized to spread breaking news and updates during disasters of all magnitudes. Unfortunately, due to the unmoderated nature of social media platforms such as Twitter, rumors and misinformation are able to propagate widely. Given this, a surfeit of research has studied rumor diffusion on social media, especially during natural disasters. In many studies, researchers manually code social media data to further analyze the patterns and diffusion dynamics of users and misinformation. This method requires many human hours, and is prone to significant incorrect classifications if the work is not checked over by another individual. In our studies, we fill the research gap by applying seven different machine learning algorithms to automatically classify misinformed Twitter data that is spread during disaster events. Due to the unbalanced nature of the data, three different balancing algorithms are also applied and compared. We collect and drive the classifiers with data from the Manchester Arena bombing (2017), Hurricane Harvey (2017), the Hawaiian incoming missile alert (2018), and the East Coast US tsunami alert (2018). Over 20,000 tweets are classified based on the veracity of their content as either true, false, or neutral, with overall accuracies exceeding 89%.