Extracting Information from Twitter Screenshots

Abstract: Screenshots are prevalent on social media as a common approach for information sharing. Users rarely verify before sharing a screenshot whether the post it contains is fake or real. Information sharing through fake screenshots can be highly responsible for misinformation and disinformation spread on social media. Our ultimate goal is to develop a tool that could take a screenshot of a tweet and provide a probability that the tweet is real, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. This paper provides methods for extracting the tweet text, timestamp, and Twitter handle from a screenshot of a tweet.