Web Archives for Verifying Attribution in Twitter Screenshots

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to verify the attribution of social media posts in screenshots by leveraging web archives, specifically the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, to combat misinformation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to verify Twitter screenshot attributions using web archives, addressing a gap in misinformation detection tools.

Findings

Successfully located archived tweets using extracted screenshot data.

Effective in verifying non-deleted tweets' attribution.

Applicable to a dataset of 1,571 screenshots.

Abstract

Screenshots of social media posts are a common approach for information sharing. Unfortunately, before sharing a screenshot, users rarely verify whether the attribution of the post is fake or real. There are numerous legitimate reasons to share screenshots. However, sharing screenshots of social media posts is also a vector for mis-/disinformation spread on social media. We are exploring methods to verify the attribution of a social media post shown in a screenshot, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. We focus on the use of web archives, since the attribution of non-deleted posts can be relatively easily verified using the live web. We show how information from a Twitter screenshot (Twitter handle, timestamp, and tweet text) can be extracted and used for locating potential archived tweets in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,571 single tweet screenshots.