Editorials & Other Articles

KoKo

(84,711 posts) Sun Jul 27, 2014, 02:42 PM Jul 2014

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

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

- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/news_literacy/verifying_ugc.php?page=all#sthash.gg5A7ZKp.dpuf

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.

MORE OF ARTICLE AT:
http://www.cjr.org/news_literacy/verifying_ugc.php?page=all#sthash.gg5A7ZKp.dpuf

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How to Check if That Viral Video is True-- Columbia Journalism Review (Original Post) KoKo Jul 2014 OP

stopfake.org is a great site. Igel Jul 2014 #1

Healthy doses of skepticism are in order... KoKo Jul 2014 #2

Igel

(35,323 posts)

1. stopfake.org is a great site.

Reply to KoKo (Original post)

Sun Jul 27, 2014, 02:59 PM

Jul 2014

Oddly, most of the "fakes" they've been outing are counter-claims.

So there was a video of a Buk missile launcher in Torez. The counterclaim was that the missile launcher was in Krasnoarmeisk, a Ukrainian launcher in Ukr-controlled territory. Stopfake.org debunks at least two of the arguments trying to show that the Torez-sited launcher video was a fake. (In brief: No, you can't read the address; and in the Torez video you clearly see trolley wires, but Krasnoarmeisk doesn't have trolleys.)

In another case a young woman in Torez posted on social media that she had used some makeup from the MH17. A "rebel" had gotten it for her--and all kinds of other things, like jewelry and clothes were making the rounds. She posted a picture of some of the makeup and of herself allegedly wearing it. So "Konsomol'" in Russia said it was a fake because a Polish paper had said something similar about another girl (point: Different girl) and in another collage about the girl from Torez they used not the Instagram photos but Twitter account screenshots. (Stopfake's point: What, the girl couldn't post on two different social media accounts?) Finally Konsomol'ka said that the makeup was only briefly for sale, last sold over a year ago, so how could it be on the plane and not all used? (It's still for sale, and stopfake shows this.)

The assumption is that the evidence from the social media stands. It has some evidence to support it--not "beyond any doubt," but there's no good reason to automatically assume since it looks bad for one side it must be bad. On the other hand, fake "debunking" is easily debunked itself. In some ways, the need to resort to fakery to debunk a claim is sort of evidence that the erstwhile debunkers couldn't find a more persuasive argument against the claims.

KoKo

(84,711 posts)

2. Healthy doses of skepticism are in order...

Reply to Igel (Reply #1)

Sun Jul 27, 2014, 03:28 PM

Jul 2014

particularly in these times with so much social media vying for attention which takes a good bit of time and resources to thoroughly dig through to try to verify.

And, its probably even wise to be skeptical of the "debunkers" until a consensus of them can come to a conclusion.

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