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Wouldn’t it be great to know when people are lying? Unless you’re a body language expert or psychic, chances are you’re going to have to rely on your gut to sort out truths from lies. When it comes to Twitter, however, you may be in luck. A team of scientists has recently developed an algorithm to sort truthful tweets from the lies. Their report, which will be published in January, says their algorithm looks for clues which we spot instinctively: we’re more likely to believe a tweet is true if it comes with a URL, for instance. It also factors in language and punctuation: question marks, exclamation marks and some pronouns suggest a tweet shouldn’t be trusted. When all is said and done, the team has been able to tell if a tweet is truthful 86 percent of the time. It’s only a matter of refining the algorithm and putting it to good use: Could Twitter be used as a crime-stopper?