Analysing Credibility of Twitter Users Using the PageRank Algorithm

Abstract: In a time when information and opinions are to a large extent shared via social media, it is important to find a way to determine how credible the content is. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether PageRank based algorithms can be used to deter- mine how credible a Twitter user is based on how much the user’s posts are retweeted by other users. Two different algorithms based on PageRank have rated the credibility of Twitter users in a network. This ranking has been compared with a manual credibil- ity check on the users to determine how close to reality the credibility distribution from the algorithms is. The results show that the algorithms can be said to preform better than random, but they still assign inaccurate credibility scores to many users. The simplicity of the algorithms is an advantage compared to other methods used in previous research. The conclusion is that the algorithms in their current states are not suitable for determin- ing the credibility of Twitter users.