Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 30, 2018

What’s Your Viral Spread Score?

Filed under: Fake News,News,Social Media,Social Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 4:13 pm

The Hoaxy homepage reports:

Visualize the spread of claims and fact checking.

Of course, when you get into the details, out of the box, Hoaxy isn’t setup to measure your ability to spread virally.

From the FAQ:


How does Hoaxy search work?

The Hoaxy corpus tracks the social sharing of links to stories published by two types of websites: (1) Low-credibility sources that often publish inaccurate, unverified, or satirical claims according to lists compiled and published by reputable news and fact-checking organizations. (2) Independent fact-checking organizations, such as snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org, that routinely fact check unverified claims.

What does the visualization show?

Hoaxy visualizes two aspects of the spread of claims and fact checking: temporal trends and diffusion networks. Temporal trends plot the cumulative number of Twitter shares over time. The user can zoom in on any time interval. Diffusion networks display how claims spread from person to person. Each node is a Twitter account and two nodes are connected if a link to a story is passed between those two accounts via retweets, replies, quotes, or mentions. The color of a connection indicates the type of information: claims and fact checks. Clicking on an edge reveals the tweet(s) and the link to the shared story; clicking on a node reveals claims shared by the corresponding user. The network may be pruned for performance.

(emphasis in original)

Bottom line is you won’t be able to ask someone for their Hoaxy score. Sorry.

On the bright side, the Hoaxy frontend and backend source code is available, so you can create a customized version (not using the Hoaxy name) with different capabilities.

The other good news is that you can study the techniques of messages that do spread virally, so you can get better at creating messages that go viral.

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