Twitter 'full of lies' after Boston bomb attacks

IN the hours after the Boston bomb attacks Twitter was ablaze with millions of tweets, many lies initiated by people intent on causing trouble.

In the wake of the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon social media was alive with rumour.

IN the hours after the Boston bomb attacks Twitter was ablaze with millions of tweets but according to researchers many of the posts were outright lies initiated by people intent on causing trouble.

From the time of the April 15 attacks until the second suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught nearly 8 million relevant tweets were sent by 3.7 million people.

A research team from the Smithsonian found that 29 per cent of these were “rumours and fake content”and half were people’s opinions. Only 20 per cent of the tweets conveyed accurate factual information.

Much of the fake content seemed malicious in its intent. Of nearly 32,000 new accounts opened that had something to say about the Boston bombings, two months later 6,000 of them had been suspended.

“We found most of these profiles exploited the sympathy of people by using words such as prayforboston, prayers, victims,” the researchers wrote.

“We can also see the malicious intent of people, as they attempt to create hoax accounts, as indicated by usage of words such as official account. The account BostonMarathons was also one such account which tried to impersonate the real bostonmarathon account.”

The researchers said the hoaxers were helped by more prominent Twitter users retweeting the falsehoods.

“The high number of verified and large follower base users propagating the fake information, can be considered as the reason for the fake tweets becoming so viral,” they wrote.