How to Check if That "Viral Video" is True or False--Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists don’t always verify user-generated content, so readers need to learn how to verify what they see online

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When big news breaks, like the Malaysian airline plane crash in eastern Ukraine on Thursday afternoon, news organizations can’t say much that’s not confirmed. So they, along with hungry news consumers, turn to user-generated content for answers, such as these first two crash-related posts on verified UGC feed FB Newswire: a photo of extra security at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and a post from a Dutch passenger as he was boarding the flight, both found and verified on Facebook. But verified items on social media are rare occurrences. See, for example, this Vox.com discussion of an item posted on a social media account possibly belonging to eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov. Incredibly of-the-moment, but possibly untrue.

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There may be little incentive to verify online content—if the error is big enough, one school of thought goes, it will self-correct. But as UGC becomes a common content source, there is an increasing push for journalists to investigate it before using it, and a host of projects have emerged recently to help them do so. These include Amnesty International’s recently launched "Citizen Evidence Lab," which provides journalists and human-rights advocates with tools for verifying user-generated video, the BBC’s "Verification Hub, the Verification Handbook &quot freely available online), recent Knight News Challenge winner "Checkdesk," and new online efforts by citizen journalists to factcheck news.

These resources, however, are targeted toward journalists rather than the reading public, who is constantly inundated by viral content with few resources at hand to check the veracity of what’s before them. In this space, UGC verification becomes a news literacy issue. But convincing readers to check before they share likely requires making the former as easy as the latter.

In Stony Brook University’s news literacy course for undergraduates, Lesson 12, called “Analyzing Social Media,” teaches students the V.I.A. method, a three-step check in which students attempt to Verify a news item by looking for creation dates and multiple, reputable sources, and evaluate the organization providing the information as Independent and Authentic by looking up background and social media connections.

The method reads like a scaled-down version of the processes acclaimed social media news agency Storyful uses in its own verification work, which it provides as a service for newsrooms. When staffers there come across a piece of UGC, they begin with skepticism and start building a story from there.

“We always start thinking from a point of: This actually could be from last year,” explained Managing Editor Aine Kerr, speaking of recent footage of a strike in Gaza. “It could be Syria. It might not even be Gaza. It might not be today. There could be photoshopping going on.”

To that end, Storyful runs the hashtag #DailyDebunk, which showcases the type of verification they do on a regular basis for newsrooms. “People are used to reading stories that obviously have been verified and are authentic and legitimate, which is great,” says Kerr, “but particularly in the world of trends and viral, the amount of hoaxes and fakery is vast.”

During the World Cup, for example, an image of a woman in a dumpster in Brazil went viral, but after "Storyful "editors ran it through their verification process, they discovered it was a year old. Images that were purported to be riots from São Paulo were similarly debunked upon reverse image search. “Within minutes we’re able to go to our clients, but crucially to the public, and say ‘These are old images, do not share them,’ ” explained Kerr.


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