Quantifying the Trustworthiness of Social Media Content

The growing popularity of social media in recent years has resulted in the creation of an enormous amount of user-generated content. A significant portion of this information is useful and has proven to be a great source of knowledge. However, since much of this information has been contributed by strangers with little or no apparent reputation to speak of, there is no easy way to detect whether the content is trustworthy. Search engines are the gateways to knowledge but search relevance cannot guarantee that the content in the search results is trustworthy. A casual observer might not be able to differentiate between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy content. This book is focused on studying the problem of quantifying the value of such shared content with respect to its trustworthiness. In particular, the focus is on shared health content as the negative impact of acting on untrustworthy content is high in this domain. Health content from two social media applications, Wikipedia and Daily Strength, is used for this research. The same approach is extended to the related problem of quantifying the usefulness or utility of content shared in response to a specific request.