Web Archives for Verifying Attribution in Twitter Screenshots
Screenshots of social media posts are a common approach for information sharing. Unfortunately, before sharing a screenshot, users rarely verify whether the attribution of the post is fake or real. There are numerous legitimate reasons to share screenshots. However, sharing screenshots of social media posts is also a vector for mis-/disinformation spread on social media. We are exploring methods to verify the attribution of a social media post shown in a screenshot, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. We focus on the use of web archives, since the attribution of non-deleted posts can be relatively easily verified using the live web. We show how information from a Twitter screenshot (Twitter handle, timestamp, and tweet text) can be extracted and used for locating potential archived tweets in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,571 single tweet screenshots.
doi
10.1145/3720553.3746682
isbn
979-8-4007-1534-1
name
Web Archives for Verifying Attribution in Twitter Screenshots
pages
91–99
source
BITS XML + supplied ACM PDF
acm_url
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3720553.3746682
authors
Tarannum Zaki, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle
doi_url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3720553.3746682
license
CC BY 4.0
summary
Screenshots of social media posts are a common approach for information sharing. Unfortunately, before sharing a screenshot, users rarely verify whether the attribution of the post is fake or real. There are numerous legitimate reasons to share screenshots. However, sharing screenshots of social media posts is also a vector for mis-/disinformation spread on social media. We are exploring methods to verify the attribution of a social media post shown in a screenshot, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. We focus on the use of web archives, since the attribution of non-deleted posts can be relatively easily verified using the live web. We show how information from a Twitter screenshot (Twitter handle, timestamp, and tweet text) can be extracted and used for locating potential archived tweets in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,571 single tweet screenshots.
keywords
Twitter, misinformation, disinformation, screenshot, web archives
arxiv_url
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22939
published
2025-09-15
conference
HT '25: 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Chicago, IL, USA, September 15-19, 2025
open_access
true
acm_html_url
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3720553.3746682
ccs_concepts
(empty)
displayAuthor
Tarannum Zaki, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle
proceedings_url
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3720553
displayPublishTime
2025-09-15
acm_reference_format
(empty)