Reputation analysis of news sources in Twitter: Particular case of Spanish presidential election in 2019

TL;DR

This paper introduces a synthetic indicator to measure user reputation on Twitter, analyzing its effectiveness in assessing news credibility during the 2019 Spanish presidential election and highlighting bots' influence.

Contribution

It proposes a novel reputation indicator for Twitter users and demonstrates its application in evaluating news credibility during a major political event.

Findings

Bots significantly influence news spread on Twitter.

Reputation correlates with perceived credibility of news.

The indicator effectively identifies credible sources.

Abstract

Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator that measures the user reputation in Twitter in order to analyze the credibility of the content in this social network. In order to show the indicator utility, we have analyzed data from some political topics in Spain from 2019 to 2020 and we have checked that bots plays a decisive role into the spread of news and, as might be expected, the link among popularity and reputation reports about the event credibility.