HOW TO VERIFY INFORMATION FROM SOCIAL MEDIA

Conférence Internationale“Les Nouvelles Pratiques du Journalisme”

Paris, 2 December 2011

“Fact-checking is not about the verification of facts,

but about the reliability of sources”

Der Spiegel’s fact-checker

FACTS & SOURCES

• Scarcity of time/attention

• Abundance of sources available

• “Nobody knows you’re a dog”

1440-MINUTES NEWS CYCLE

“Every piece of information, and every person, leaves a trail of data that you can use to build a

picture of its reliability”

Paul Bradshaw

FACELESS DOGS?

Tweet first, verify later

“The first Twitter Disaster” Foreign Policy

YOUTUBEFLICKR

FACEBOOK USHAHIDI

UGC AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Three different approaches to social media:

1.BBC.comCentralized

2.The Guardian.co.ukDecentralized

3.CNN.com Community-centered

BBC.com

Centralized Approach

UGC Hub located at the “heart” of the BBC’s newsroom in London

TEAM

•23 people

•24/7 since 2009

•10.000 contributions every day

POLICY

• Assessing audience’s contributions

• Finding sources on social media

• Verify first, publish later

THE GUARDIAN.co.uk

TEAM

•Meg Pickard, Head of the Digital Engagement

•Embedded Community Coordinators

•“It’s everybody’s job”

POLICY

• Participating in conversations

• Curating live-blogs

• Context-based verification process

• First tweet, verify later

Decentralized Approach

Mutualization of the newspaper

CNN.com

TEAM

•20 people

•Everybody is an iReporter

•10.000 iReports every month

POLICY

• Only few iReports are authenticated

• Badge/disclaimer

• Vetted iReports can be aired on CNN

• Website: First tweet, verify later

Community-Centered Approach

iReport.com: a proprietary, user generated content platform

HAITI - STORIES

CNN has the highest number of stories

HAITI - SOURCES

CNN has the highest number of sources

HAITI – SOURCES FROM HAITI

CNN: Social media crucial for the coverage from Haiti

1. Without professionals on the ground UGC can help provide useful first-hand witnesses (text, video, pictures)

2. Not only individuals, but also NGOs were more and more active on social media

3. The 1440-minute news-cycle is changing verification criteria inside mainstream media outlets

A) A less strict policy on social media can help news organizations to widen the diversity of voices and to better cover crisis events

B) BBC is the news-organizations with the best policies for UGC verification

C) The Guardian and CNN prefer speed to accuracy, “curation” to verification

HAITI – SOME CONCLUSIONS

Tools for social media verification

GOOGLE MAPS – STREET VIEW

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

EXIF DATA

http://errorlevelanalysis.com/

PHOTOSHOPPED?

http://errorlevelanalysis.com/

http://errorlevelanalysis.com/

• Witnesses (the creators of original content)

• Amplifiers (passing content on to a wider audience)

• Filters (people who everyone else looks to for judgement)

Mark Little

TWEET VERIFICATION

1. Timestamp2. Contextual tweets3. Authority4. How many past tweets 5. Google them6. Check for related tweets7. Talk to them directly

TWITTER CHECK-LIST

• Ask for a phone number and call the person

• Ask if they witnessed first-hand or heard about it

• Ask exactly what they witnessed, how they saw it and when

• Ask who else may have the same info

FOLLOW UP THE TIP

HUMAN ALGORITHM

“There is no secret sauce in this process.

It is old fashioned reporting powered by advanced social web tools”

Eight Simple Rules for Doing Accurate Journalism - Columbia Journalism Review

Best Practices for Social Media Verification - Columbia Journalism Review

B.S. Detection for Journalists - Slideshare

The Human Algorithm - Storyful Blog

How to Verify a Tweet - Twitter Journalism

Information venue du Web, check! - Slate.fr

Tweet First, Verify Later – Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

BBC processes for verifying social media content

USEFUL RESOURCES

NICOLA BRUNOwww.effecinque.org

Twitter @nicolabrunoEmail nicobruno@gmail.com