By: Morris Lee
These days, social media has been a huge part of our lives including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat as it has risen by 176 million users in the past year, since 2014! Kids in elementary school already have smartphones and tablets as elders are just beginning to understand what the world has come to. Technology and the Internet have been advancing and growing so fast that now almost half the world’s population are active social media users. Kids who are in high school, middle school, and elementary school take up 71 percent of the whole social media accounts. People view millions of posts every day and thousands of videos and tweets go viral as websites and users are thirsty for clicks, likes and views. Twitter itself has 284 million users with 500 million tweets a day!
Twitter has recently implemented a new tool created by computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. This new tool called CREDBANK is a database compiler that sorts through the feeds and filters the tweets and help reduce the false tweets and videos that often go viral which provides false information to the world. Researchers Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert began by obtaining a mere 1 percent of the tweets in Twitter’s entire feed. Next, their software filtered and trimmed all the tweets for spam and then automatically sorting the tweets by topics, later searching for false information.
What they found was astonishing. The results showed that 25 percent of the information posted and tweeted on Twitter was a hoax and had no credibility. This means that every day, 125 million tweets on Twitter contain false information. So next time you read a post or watch a short video, it may not always be true. “Don’t believe everything you read on Twitter,” New Scientist reports.
