overview
Claim: McDonalds is opening a Phoenix restaurant run by robots
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 1117693) and Wellesley College
Welcome to TwitterTrails, a system to investigate the spread and validity of stories on Twitter.
TwitterTrails gathers data about news stories, rumors, events, and memes on Twitter, to present
in useful and meaningful visualizations that can help users answer questions about how the story
spread. Scroll down for the visualizations, or click on “overview” on the top left of the page
to view data about this story. For more information about the specific visualizations or the
TwitterTrails system, please
read our blog or follow
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This page, created automatically by TwitterTrails at 8:41 PM on 26 May 2015, investigates a story based on the following tweet:
Data collected were tweets posted for about the week prior to the start of the investigation.
During that time, propagation of this story was insignificant, and in general people were dubious of the information presented.
The Propagation Graph highlights the tweets which were
influential in breaking the story on Twitter, and highlights independent content creators.
Each point on the graph represents a tweet, and hovering over or clicking on the point will
display the tweet to the right of the graph. Tweets are plotted on x-axis of the graph
based on the time they were posted, and on the y-axis by the number of retweets they have
received (at the time of data collection). Points are sized based on the number of followers
the user who posted the tweet has. The color of the point represents how similar the language
of a tweet is compared to the other tweets on the graph: tweets with nearly identical texts will
have points that are the same color. Additionally, tweets written by verified accounts will
have a bright blue border on their point in the graph.
This graph shows the activity over time of relevant data we collected, and the estimated total activity of
that data (based on the number of retweets of the tweets we collected). Time is on the x-axis and the number of
tweets generated is on the y-axis. Each point represents a ten minute time span. You can zoom in on
the graph by clicking and dragging your mouse over a period of time.
Clicking on
Manage Series on the bottom right of the display will open a panel which you can
use to add new time series to the graph by checking the box on the left. The Search function takes a search
term in the text box, and will display all tweets contain (the exact) search term when you check the box on the
left of Search.
Selecting a point on the graph will display the tweets from that series in that ten minute time span
to the right of the graph. These tweets are sorted by the number of retweets they have received (highest on top),
and can be re-sorted using the drop down menus. If there are more than 50 tweets in the time span, links to navigate
the tweets 50 at a time are provided.
This section shows the most tweeted links in the story (shortened urls are expanded when counting links). The 10 most tweeted
links appear, as well as the number of times they were tweeted and the total number of users who tweeted them. Clicking on
the icon will expand the display and show the tweets (excluding retweets)
which contain the expanded link.
This widget allows you to search for a user by their screen name (using the text box and search button). If multiple results
are found, click on the name of the user you are searching for to display their information. Clicking on a user in one of the
network graphs or syncing a tweet will also display information about the selected user (or the user who wrote the selected tweet)
here.
When displaying a user, information about the user will appear on the left of the widget, and the tweets they have
written and retweeted will display on the right (and can be sorted using the drop down menus on the bottom of the left hand panel).
The most retweeted images are displayed in this visualization. Clicking on an image will open the tweet on Twitter in which
that image was posted.