Credibility in Online Social Networks: A Survey

The importance of information credibility in society cannot be underestimated given that it is at the heart of all decision-making. Generally, more information is better; however, knowing the value of this information is essential for the decision-making processes. Information credibility defines a measure of the fitness of the information for consumption. It can also be defined in terms of reliability, which denotes the probability that a data source will appear credible to the users. A challenge in this topic is that there is a great deal of literature that has developed different credibility dimensions. In addition, information science dealing with online social networks has grown in complexity, attracting interest from researchers in information science, psychology, human–computer interaction, communication studies, and management studies, all of whom have studied the topic from different perspectives. This work will attempt to provide an overall review of the credibility assessment literature over the period 2006–2017 as applied to the context of the microblogging platform, Twitter. The known interpretations of credibility will be examined, particularly as they relate to the Twitter environment. In addition, we investigate levels of credibility assessment features. We then discuss recent works, addressing a new taxonomy of credibility analysis and assessment techniques. At last, a cross-referencing of literature is performed while suggesting new topics for future studies of credibility assessment in a social media context.