Title
Web Scraping versus Twitter API: A Comparison for a Credibility Analysis
Date Issued
30 November 2020
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract
Twitter is one of the most popular information source available on the Web. Thus, there exist many studies focused on analyzing the credibility of the shared information. Most proposals use either Twitter API or web scraping to extract the data to perform such analysis. Both extraction techniques have advantages and disadvantages. In this work, we present a study to evaluate their performance and behavior. The motivation for this research comes from the necessity to know ways to extract online information in order to analyze in real-time the credibility of the content posted on the Web. To do so, we develop a framework which offers both alternatives of data extraction and implements a previously proposed credibility model. Our framework is implemented as a Google Chrome extension able to analyze tweets in real-time. Results report that both methods produce identical credibility values, when a robust normalization process is applied to the text (i.e., tweet). Moreover, concerning the time performance, web scraping is faster than Twitter API, and it is more flexible in terms of obtaining data; however, web scraping is very sensitive to website changes.
Start page
263
End page
273
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Informática y Ciencias de la Información Bioinformática Ciencias de la Información
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85100336680
Resource of which it is part
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
ISBN of the container
9781450389228
Conference
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus