Location impact on source and linguistic features for information credibility of social media

Purpose: Social media platforms provide a source of information about events. However, this information may not be credible, and the distance between an information source and the event may impact on that credibility. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address an understanding of the relationship between sources, physical distance from that event and the impact on credibility in social media. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors focus on the impact of location on the distribution of content sources (informativeness and source) for different events, and identify the semantic features of the sources and the content of different credibility levels. Findings: The study found that source location impacts on the number of sources across different events. Location also impacts on the proportion of semantic features in social media content. Research limitations/implications: This study illustrated the influence of location on credibility in social media. The study provided an overview of the relationship between content types including semantic features, the source and event locations. However, the authors will include the findings of this study to build the credibility model in the future research. Practical implications: The results of this study provide a new understanding of reasons behind the overestimation problem in current credibility models when applied to different domains: such models need to be trained on data from the same place of event, as that can make the model more stable. Originality/value: This study investigates several events – including crisis, politics and entertainment – with steady methodology. This gives new insights about the distribution of sources, credibility and other information types within and outside the country of an event. Also, this study used the power of location to find alternative approaches to assess credibility in social media.