Analysis of Microblog Rumors and Correction Texts for Disaster Situations

Microblogging systems such as Twitter have become popular. They are especially useful and helpful for users in disaster situations. Microblogs have facilitated the spread of information of all kinds, even rumors. Rumors block adequate information sharing and cause severe problems. Several studies have analyzed rumors, but it remains unclear how rumors are spread on microblogging systems. As described in this paper, we present a case study of how rumors are spread on Twitter in a recent disaster situation, that of the Great East Japan earthquake in March 11 2011, based on comparison to a normal situation. We also specifically examine the correction of rumors because automatic extraction of rumors is difficult, but extracting rumor-correction is easier than extracting the rumors themselves. We (1) classify tweets in disaster situations, (2) analyze tweets in disaster situations based on user's impression, and (3) compare the spread of rumor tweets in a disaster situation to that in a normal situation.