Detecting Real-time Check-worthy Factual Claims in Tweets Related to U.S. Politics
Abstract
In increasing democracy and improving political discourse, political fact-checking has come to be a necessity. While politicians make claims about facts all the time, journalists and fact-checkers oftentimes reveal them as false, exaggerated, or misleading. Use of technology and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter has rapidly increased the spread of misinformation. Thus, human fact-checkers face difficulty in keeping up with a massive amount of claims, and falsehoods frequently outpace truths. All U.S. politicians have successively adopted Twitter, and they make use of Twitter for a wide variety of purposes, a great example being making claims to enhance their popularity.
Toward the aim of helping journalists and fact-checkers, we developed a system that automatically detects check-worthy factual claims in tweets related to U.S. politics and posts them on a publicly visible Twitter account. The research consists of two processes: collecting and processing political tweets. The process for detecting check-worthy factual claims involves preprocessing collected tweets, finding the check-worthiness score of each tweet, and applying several filters to eliminate redundant and irrelevant tweets. Finally, a political classification model distinguishes tweets related to U.S. politics from other tweets and reposts them on a created Twitter account.