The document summarizes Martin Lafréchoux's presentation on tracking the spread of a misattributed Martin Luther King Jr. quote on Twitter in May 2011. Lafréchoux used various tools to reconstruct the information cascade, or "digital paleontology", starting from a Facebook post that misattributed the quote to King. He traces how the quote spread on Twitter, with some high-profile shares, before journalists eventually debunked the fake quote. Lafréchoux evaluated the different Twitter APIs and tools he used to analyze the cascade long after it happened in real-time.

1. Digital Paleontology
Digging for Ancient Tweets
Martin Lafréchoux
JITSO 2012 – EPFL, December 4th, 2012
Full text of the Research notes is available on the JITSO website and on my research blog
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Pic : www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/307016400/

2. Hi. My name is Martin Lafréchoux.
I am a PhD student at Paris Ouest Nanterre. My dissertation deals with the web page as a
document.
I'll try not to repeat the content of the research notes published on the website. I'd rather
address some points that were left out due to space constraints or because they were not
ready for publication.
Mostly I’ll talk about the various twitter APIs and their implications to the researcher.
But first I'd like to try and explain the title of the presentation. Digital Paleontology - why ?

3. - Twitter is live. You watch twitter as you would TV, to see what's happening right now.
When a piece of information spreads on twitter, it creates a cascade
Cascades are live data, best observed in the wild ; that's the whole point of just-in-time
sociology.
The cascade goes on for a short while, then it disappears.
Twitter offers several ways to observe these cascades.
We will go through them briefly
It’s a bit hard to represent something as vivid in a slide, so I hope you can pardon me for
using shaky visual metaphors

4. Basic use:
visiting twitter.com
The most simple way is to observe information cascades is in the wild, using the twitter web
client.
You’re in the middle of the action, but that’s not always the best place to see the big picture.
If that’s not precise enough, twitter offers several API with distinct characteristics.
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Pic : http://www.public-domain-image.com/

5. Real Time:
the Streaming API
The most complete API is called the streaming API. Complete access to all posted tweets is
called the firehose.
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Pic : http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/5887790560/

6. Access is pretty limited, both expensive and exclusive.
Gaining access to the firehose is one thing. Then you have to have the stomach to drink from
it.

7. October 2012 average :
500 000 000 / day
A complete recording for a month of twitter in january 2011 is about 1 billion tweets (Myers
& Leskovec, 2012), that’s about 400 unique tweets per second on average, not counting RTs.
That’s for an average day, almost two years ago.
In October twitter CEO reported 500 million tweets per day. http://news.cnet.com/
8301-1023_3-57541566-93/report-twitter-hits-half-a-billion-tweets-a-day/
That’s about 5800 per second.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrish_99/7431798496/

8. There is not much you can do with such an astonishing stream of data besides displaying it,
as twitter does, or storing it to analyze it later. Even that requires huge resources.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/5683179189/

9. Digital Taxidermy ?
Once recorded, the live data is frozen. The cascades are turned in something like a stuffed
animal. Digital taxidermy, if you will.
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Damien Hirst, The Physical Imbossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaostrophy/2594401926/

10. Just-in-time:
The Search API
The next best option is to use the Search API to analyze tweets in real-time, as they are
published.
After real-time recording, you get just-in-time. For 6 to nine days, you can use the twitter
search API.
The search API would be like an underwater tunnel, giving you easy access to the closest
data.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorensztajer/4201751064/

11. A bit too late :
the REST API
But what happens after that, after real-time? When you are just-too-late?
After a week or so, you only have the REST API available.
It means you cannot search, and you only get 150 API calls an hour.
You can view the details of a tweet or a user if you already know where to look.
As the twitter dev docs put it, you need to get «creative» to get what you want with such
limitations.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkenroboter/6604532503/

12. Much too late...
Digital Paleontology
You don’t have access to the real, live cascade anymore, but you can still see its shadow, its
ghost.
And if you spend enough time putting back together the scattered pieces, it can give you a
good idea of what the cascade was.
So, what happens when you were too late for just-in-time amounts to me digital
paleontology.
There are bits and pieces of data, scattered all over the web if you only know where to dig.
For my PhD, I am trying to work a bit of digital paleontology to reconstruct an information
cascade that happened more than a year and a half ago, on may 2, 2011.
As you may have guessed, I originally tried to map the cascade about 15 days after the fact
using the twitter API, and came back sorely disappointed. I tried again six months later, and
this presentation is the result of my work.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14508691@N08/4531324072/

13. May 01, 2011 – 03:58PM ET
On twitter, it began like this. A Pakistani can’t sleep because of a helicopter.
(Timestamps are crucial. I have converted everything to Eastern Time for clarity.)

14. May 01, 2011 – 10:24PM ET
Six and a half hours later, wrestler and entertainer Dawyne ‘The Rock’ Johnson posts a rather
cryptic tweet.

15. May 01, 2011 – 10:24PM ET
At the same exact minute, former Rumsfeld Chief of Staff posts a more explicit one.

16. People begin gathering in front of the White House, waiting for the press conference.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theqspeaks/5679548043/

17. May 02, 2011 – 11:35PM ET
An hour later, Barak Obama appeared on TV to announce the news.
Responses were mixed.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_embassy_newzealand/5682145416/

18. Some Americans were very vocal in their enthusiasm.
Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zokuga/5678699597/

19. “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read
some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Mark Twain
Somewhat less enthusiastic Americans expressed their feelings by tweeting this quote by
Mark Twain.
... which is actually by civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow.
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Pic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Twain,_Brady-
Handy_photo_portrait,_Feb_7,_1871,_cropped.jpg

20. “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read
some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Clarence Darrow
Somewhat less enthusiastic Americans expressed their feelings by tweeting this quote by
Mark Twain.
... which is actually by civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow.
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Pic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Twain,_Brady-
Handy_photo_portrait,_Feb_7,_1871,_cropped.jpg

21. It seems that Mark Twain is to the US as Winston Churchill is to the UK or Jules Renard to
France: funny quotes are attributed to him by default.
The mistake probably comes down to this page. You can imagine how this would look as a
Google snippet.
http://www.estatevaults.com/lm/archives/2006/08/16/twain_and_darro.html

22. “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I
will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some Americans were appalled that bin Laden was killed rather than taken into custody.
Many chose to tweet this quote of Martin Luther King to express their feelings.
As you may have guessed, Martin Luther King never said or wrote this sentence.
And this is what I will be talking about today, after a rather lengthy introduction.
Now, how did this happen? How did this misattributed quote go viral?
Now that’s a job for a digital paleontologist.
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Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_Luther_King_Jr_NYWTS.jpg

23. “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I
will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
Some Americans were appalled that bin Laden was killed rather than taken into custody.
Many chose to tweet this quote of Martin Luther King to express their feelings.
As you may have guessed, Martin Luther King never said or wrote this sentence.
And this is what I will be talking about today, after a rather lengthy introduction.
Now, how did this happen? How did this misattributed quote go viral?
Now that’s a job for a digital paleontologist.
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Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_Luther_King_Jr_NYWTS.jpg

24. “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I
will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
?
Some Americans were appalled that bin Laden was killed rather than taken into custody.
Many chose to tweet this quote of Martin Luther King to express their feelings.
As you may have guessed, Martin Luther King never said or wrote this sentence.
And this is what I will be talking about today, after a rather lengthy introduction.
Now, how did this happen? How did this misattributed quote go viral?
Now that’s a job for a digital paleontologist.
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Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martin_Luther_King_Jr_NYWTS.jpg

25. The cascade
We don’t often get to see the starting point of an information epidemic, but in this case it is
known.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vilseskogen/3279138165/

26. It all started from this facebook post.
Jessica Dovey, who teaches English in Kobe, Japan posts the following message on her
Facebook wall.

27. May 02, 2011 – 12:15PM ET
It’s interesting because :
- we don’t always get access to the starting point of a cascade
- we don’t often get to see Facebook at all.
I was prepared to say that we have no idea what happened exactly, but I’ll make a guess.

28. All that we know is that at some point, someone stripped the quote of anything that was
actually written by MLK and presented him as the author.
Here is what (to the best of my knowledge) happened.

29. All that we know is that at some point, someone stripped the quote of anything that was
actually written by MLK and presented him as the author.
Here is what (to the best of my knowledge) happened.

30. 02:22PM ET
A user posted the whole quote to twitlonger, mistakenly attributing the whole of it to MLK.
Quite a few tweets point to this page (it says 80, Topsy recorded a dozen or so)

31. Many of these tweets have been deleted, probably in shame when their authors realized they
had posted a fake quote.

32. And then someone posted the first part of the misattributed quote on twitter.
We only have a faint trace it left on Topsy, a twitter archiving service.

33. 02:42PM ET
Fortunately for us, some twitter archives exist.
Here is the earliest recorded tweet.
(Theses tweets are called the ‘quote corpus’ my research notes.)

34. 02:52PM ET
Ten minutes later, a properly formatted quote reaches a so-called ‘Influential account’

35. 03:15PM ET
25 minutes later, the quote is reposted by Penn Jillette, a pretty famous US magician.
At that point, several things happen.
(a) The cascade accelerates exponentially
(b) Some people, mostly journalists, begin to doubt the authenticity of the quote.

36. May 2, 6:23PM
Megan McArdle, then an editor at The Atlantic, publishes a blog post at the end of the
afternoon where she expresses her doubts as to the authenticity of the quote.
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Newspaper icon: http://thenounproject.com/noun/newspaper/#icon-No1233

37. It’s thanks to the work of Megan McArdle at the Atlantic that we have Dovey’s screencap.
She obtained it via conventional journalism techniques, such as e-mailing a human being.
That’s significant because we would never have gained access to a private FB post via an API.
Journalists have their own investigation techniques.
They are a tad low-tech but this is changing, thanks to the ‘data-journalism’ trend currently
going on. (This comes with its own set of issues which I won’t discuss here).
She followed up with a second article where she identifies Jessica Dovey.

38. Penn Jillette retracts his previous tweet as soon as he realizes his mistake.
This tweet does not really attract the same kind of attention as the quote.

39. May 3,
03:20PM ET
The interesting thing is that media coverage modified - almost bent - the cascade as it was
still unfolding. Journalists were there at the right time, when it was still happening.
But they did not know how to use an API. This Salon.com article mistakenly believes that PJ
was the first one to post the tweet on twitter.

40. Why did Penn Jillette create a fake Martin Luther King Jr.
quote yesterday? - Twitter - Salon.com
May 3,
03:20PM ET
The interesting thing is that media coverage modified - almost bent - the cascade as it was
still unfolding. Journalists were there at the right time, when it was still happening.
But they did not know how to use an API. This Salon.com article mistakenly believes that PJ
was the first one to post the tweet on twitter.

41. PJ reacts.

42. Salon then posted a follow up piece, which was actually deleted at some later point - I don’t
know when, I just realized it while working on these very slides.
A few days ago I could still access it using Google Cache, which is another form of ‘ghosting’.

43. And that was the cache last night.
Penn Jilette did not delete his tweets, which is a rather classy move on his part.

44. Then the big players and blogs take it from there.
kottke, wapo, CNN, AllthingsD, New Yorker (avec timestamp)
And Jason Kottke, who actually wrote what I consider to be the best write-up.

45. Then the big players and blogs take it from there.
kottke, wapo, CNN, AllthingsD, New Yorker (avec timestamp)
And Jason Kottke, who actually wrote what I consider to be the best write-up.

46. May 2,
06:26PM ET
From there, the cascade branches again, creating a new twitter track.
Here is the first tweet identifying the quote as fake. It was posted a few minutes after Megan
McArdle’s first blog post but does not contain a link.

47. Most tweets calling out the MLK quote as fake contain a link to some type of blog post or
news article.
My hypothesis is that people are more likely to include a link to some outside source when
their tweet goes 'against the flow'. It gives more weight to their tweets.
Dissenting voices have a hard time being heard on twitter.
[These tweets are called the ‘links corpus’ my research notes.]

48. As you can see, the peak of the links corpus (yellow) comes about 24h after the ‘quotes
corpus’ peak.

49. Tools & Evaluation
A quick review of the tools used for this presentation.
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anomieus/6205869109/

50. [journalists]
If I may go back to the wildlife metaphor for a second, journalists are a bit like a crew filming
a wildlife documentary.
Journalists were instrumental in this whole affair. Their analog worked and got results that
would have been impossible to obtain using API (most notably on Facebook).
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Pic: http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-
photos/people-public-domain-images-pictures/people-filming-in-wild-nature.jpg

51. Some of them used a bit of google-fu to identify the quote as fake. With a date range filter,
you can see wether a quote just appeared on the web or not.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/226912/google_daterange_filter.html
But their lack of knowledge of the inner workings of twitter showed. Salon blamed PJ, and no
one was unable to identify the first twitter posts - less than 48 hours after the beginning of
the cascade. The twitter Search API was still available.
Salon, for example, does not reveal how they found their results, but obviously the methods
were suboptimal (my guess is that they did not realize that twitter displays so-called ‘Top
results’ as default search results).
That's changing as we speak. Data journalism is probably going to be featured in a number of
2012 buzzwords list.

52. [data journalists]
[This is probably what data journalists look like.]
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Pic: http://www.public-domain-image.com/

53. As for my own tools, the results shown today rely mostly on a twitter archiving service called
Topsy.
When twitter announced its new terms of service this summer, almost all members of the
twitter ecosystem cried in terror. Not Topsy. Topsy is exactly the kind of service twitter wants
as a partner. This is the kind of ecosystem twitter is trying to build.

54. There are various twitter archiving services. I chose Topsy because it is the most fully
featured free twitter archive that I could find.
The crucial point was that it allowed to use a date range filter on the search.

55. Topsy even offers an API, otter. You can interact with it using python-otter, a python library,
or directly using the REST API.

56. Topsy archives...
> tweets containing a link, or
> tweets that were retweeted
How much does Topsy archive ? The first question would be ‘What does Topsy archive?’
Tweets are recorded when either (a) they are retweeted by someone else or (b) they contain a
link

57. Interesting caveat: Topsy records tweets when they are published. It means that if you delete
a tweet after Topsy has archived it, the tweet will be removed from twitter, but not from
Topsy.
It’s something to keep in mind: Topsy offers something like a ghost image, a remanent
image.

58. Interesting caveat: Topsy records tweets when they are published. It means that if you delete
a tweet after Topsy has archived it, the tweet will be removed from twitter, but not from
Topsy.
It’s something to keep in mind: Topsy offers something like a ghost image, a remanent
image.

59. ‘quote’ corpus
2657 different authors in Topsy data
394 were unavailable on twitter
( ) Hidden : 94
Suspended : 4
Closed : 296
ghosting effect on the ‘quotes’ corpus

60. test sample
174368 tweets, including :
3140 RT
18400 links
Topsy’s coverage ≈12,1%
Topsy archives tweets that were retweeted or tweets containing an URL. Topsy archives
tweets *that are links*. This is the value. The textual content is impossible / not cost-
effective to exploit right now.
To evaluate our results is to evaluate Topsy
It has become pretty hard to get a twitter dataset : twitter recently changed its terms of
service and several previously available datasets have become unavailable.
I got a sample from the streaming API. It contains about 175000 tweets, which amounts to a
few minutes of firehose output.
On our sample, Topsy’s coverage would be about 12%, excluding duplicates

61. In closing...
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Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/6217534124/

62. •Resource decay is not uniform
•Linked content has more value
•Media coverage plays an important part in
the phenomenon and in what survives
At least in the case of twitter, decay is not evenly distributed.
Content that survives is content that was interesting to someone, content that is linked. The
value is the link, not the content.
In our case, it’s worth considering that media coverage both unearthed some content (the FB
screenshot) and buried other pieces of information (deleted tweets).
Journalists and data investigation techniques are complementary. Data journalism will
probably fuse the two in the long run.

63. Thank you
m.lafrechoux@gmail.com
http://nologos.net/
@lagayascienza
Thank you for your attention.
Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmechtley/5379944214/