A new study, led by Apoorva Chauhan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, found that in evaluating the trustworthiness of social media accounts named after crisis events, people sometimes pay attention to the page’s profile picture, name, the number of followers it has, and spelling and grammatical errors.
“Some of these things can be easily spoofed,” said Dr. Chauhan. “People need to think beyond things that can be easily manipulated and look at the authenticity of the source of information.”
