Details of the project report can be found here.

The package contains data information about 20,000 pieces of rumor reports, crawled from the first 1,000 pages of Sina Weibo’s rumor showcase (http://service.account.weibo.com).

• Python >= 2.6 (but not 3.x)
• numpy
• matplotlib ([http://matplotlib.org/users/installing.html] (http://matplotlib.org/users/installing.html))
• BeautifulSoup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/)
• seaborn (http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/)

• Fill in your own Sina Weibo username and password in the main function of “rumor_crawler.py” file and save.

    username = '...your username...'
    pwd = '...your password...'

• You can modify the starting crawling page and ending crawling page by adjusting the parameters when calling the function of iterate_pages(start,end). In our code, the default starting page is 1 and ending page is 100.

• Run the crawler:

    $python rumor_crawler.py

• To visualize:

    $python visual.py