Rumour Detection in the Wild: A Browser Extension for Twitter

Rumour detection, particularly on social media, has gained popularity in recent years. The machine learning community has made significant contributions in investigating automatic methods to detect rumours on such platforms. However, these state-of-the-art (SoTA) models are often deployed by social media companies; ordinary end-users cannot leverage the solutions in the literature for their own rumour detection. To address this issue, we put forward a novel browser extension that allows these users to perform rumour detection on Twitter. Particularly, we leverage the performance from SoTA architectures, which has not been done previously. Initial results from a user study confirm that this browser extension provides benefit. Additionally, we examine the performance of our browser extension's rumour detection model in a simulated deployment environment. Our results show that additional infrastructure for the browser extension is required to ensure its usability when deployed as a live service for Twitter users at scale.