  Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience
news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional
journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these
platforms, often raising questions of veracity and credibility of the reported
information. Here we ask: How do the dynamics of collective attention directed
toward an event reported on social media vary with its perceived credibility?
By examining the first large-scale, systematically tracked credibility database
of public Twitter messages (47M messages corresponding to 1,138 real-world
events over a span of three months), we established a relationship between the
temporal dynamics of events reported on social media and their associated level
of credibility judgments. Representing collective attention by the aggregate
temporal signatures of an event reportage, we found that the amount of
continued attention focused on an event provides information about its
associated levels of perceived credibility. Events exhibiting sustained,
intermittent bursts of attention were found to be associated with lower levels
of perceived credibility. In other words, as more people showed interest during
moments of transient collective attention, the associated uncertainty
surrounding these events also increased.
