ABSTRACT

This chapter first reviews literature on the science of fact checking and computational approaches for studying misinformation in the social media era. The chapter then provides a small empirical investigation into how the truthfulness of news stories affects the dynamics of their diffusion on Twitter. This involves first conducting a fact-checking exercise of a sample of Australian politics-related news stories, and then assessing how these news stories were engaged with on Twitter (via retweets), in an attempt to establish how the veracity of news stories is related to their diffusion on Twitter.