Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

First Draft launches its online verification training course

From the post:

Journalists strive to get the story right, but as we are bombarded by far more information than ever before, the tools and skills crucial to telling the whole story are undergoing a profound change. Understanding who took the photo or video, who created the website and why, enables journalists to meet these challenges. Verification training, up until now, has largely been done on the job and as needed. But today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our online verification course.

In this course, we teach you the steps involved in verifying the eyewitness media, fabricated websites, visual memes and manipulated videos that emerge on social media. The course is designed so that anyone can take the course from start to finish online, or educators can take elements and integrate into existing classroom teaching. For newsroom training managers, we hope the you can encourage your staff to take the course online, or you can take individual videos and tutorials and use during brown-bag lunches. We provide relevant and topical examples — from events such as Hurricane Irma and the conflict in Syria — to show how these skills and techniques are put into practice.
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The course is open only to First Draft partners until January 2018, so consider that as an incentive for your organization to become a First Draft partner!

I haven’t seen the course material but the video introduction:

and the high quality of all other First Draft materials, sets high expectations for the verification course.

Looking forward to a First Draft course on skepticism for journalists, which uses the recent Wall Street Journal repetition of government slanders about Kerspersky Lab, which is subsequently discovered to be: “we (Israel) broke into the Kerpersky house and while robbing the place saw another burglar (Russia) there and they were looking for NSA software, so we alerted the NSA.” How Israel Caught Russian Hackers Scouring the World for U.S. Secrets

Only an editor suffering from nationalism to the point being a mental disorder would publish such a story without independent verification. Could well all be true but when all the sources are known liars, something more is necessary before reporting it as “fact.”

Media Verification Assistant

From the welcome screen:

Who

We are a joint team of engineers and investigators from CERTH-ITI and Deutsche Welle, aiming to build a comprehensive tool for image verification on the Web.

Features

The Media Verification Assistant features a multitude of image tampering detection algorithms plus metadata analysis, GPS Geolocation, EXIF Thumbnail extraction and integration with Google reverse image search.

Alpha

It is constantly being developed, expanded and upgraded -our ambition is to include most state-of-the-art verification technologies currently available on the Web, plus unique implementations of numerous experimental algorithms from the research literature. As the platform is currently in its Alpha stage, errors may occur and some algorithms may not operate as expected.

Feedback

For comments, suggestions and error reports, please contact verifymedia@iti.gr.

Sharing

The source code of the Java back-end is freely distributed at GitHub.

Even in alpha, this is a great project!

Even though images can be easily altered, Photoshop and Gimp, they continue to be admissible in court, so long as a witness testifies the image
is a fair and accurate representation of the subject matter.

This project has spawned a related project: Tweet Verification Assistant, which leverages the image algorithms to verify tweets with an image or video.

Another first stop before retweeting or re-publishing an image with a story.

In the battle against fake news, Storyzy A.I. fights fake quotes

From the post:

The Quote Verifier launched today by Storyzy takes the battle against fake news to a whole new automated level by conveniently flagging fake quotes on social networks and search engines with +50,000 new authentic quotes added daily.

Storyzy aims to help social networks and search engines by spotting fake quotes. To fulfill this ambition Storyzy developed a tool (currently available in Beta version) that verifies whether a quote is authentic or not by checking if a person truly said that or not.
… (emphasis in original)

A tool for your short-list of verification tools to use on a daily basis.

It’s ineffective against the Trump White House because accurate quotes can still be “false.”

“Truthful quotes,” as per Trump White House policy, issue only from the President and must reflect what he meant to say. Subject to correction by the President.

A “truthful quote,” consists of three parts:

1. Said by the President
2. Reflects what he meant to say
3. Includes any subsequent correction by the President (one or more)

There is a simply solution to avoiding “false” quotes from President Trump:

Never quote him or his tweets at all.

Quote his lackeys, familiars and sycophants, but not him.

Turkey, propaganda and eyewitness media: A case study in verification for news by Sam Dubberley.

I would amend Michael Garibaldi‘s line in Babylon 5: Exercise of Vital Powers (#4.16):

Everybody lies.

to read:

Everybody lies. [The question is why?]

No report (“true” or “false”) is made to you without motivation. The attempt to discern that motivation can improve your handling of such reports.

Sam’s account is a great illustration of taking the motivation for a report into account.

First Draft – Observational Challenge by Jenni Sargent.

From the webpage:

Can you identify these locations based on the visual clues in the pictures? Think about street signs, the language of shop signs, the landscape and architecture to get an idea of where it might be.

To learn more about identifying locations, see this article on ‘Piecing together visual clues for verification‘.

From the challenge:

Each photograph in this challenge contains visual clues to help you identify where it was taken.

You have four chances to get each one right.

Helpful hints appear with every wrong answer but you will lose 1 point with each attempt.

Sorry! No spoilers!

I’m surprised that someone doesn’t have a daily photo-id twitter stream.

They may, if you run across one ping me!

Enjoy!

Knowing where to look: Sources of imagery for geolocation by Eliot Higgins.

From the post:

With geolocation playing a core role in the verification of images, one key part of the process is finding reference information to help confirm the location of the image in question.

As recently covered on First Draft, satellite imagery from Google Earth and other providers can play an essential role in the geolocation of images. But they are not the only sources of information for corroborating material that can help you figure out where a picture or video was taken.
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The resources Eliot covers need to be on your internal verification homepage. One-click away from your immediate verification need.

I really like his phrase, “knowing where to look.”

That resonates with so many topic map themes.

5 vital browser plugins for newsgathering and verification by Alastair Reid.

From the post:

When breaking news can travel the world in seconds, it is important for journalists to have the tools at their disposal to get to work fast. When searching the web, what quicker way is there to have those tools available than directly in the browser window?

Most browsers have a catalogue of programs and software to make your browsing experience more powerful, like a smartphone app store. At First Draft we find Google’s Chrome browser is the most effective but there are obviously other options available.

Here are five of the most useful browser extensions for finding and checking newsworthy material online.
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Alastair details five browser plugins to accelerate your search for information on breaking news stories.

Three of the five are focused on images, which can be very powerful but are useful only for a limited range of stories.

Accounts of the skulduggery of government agencies, standards organizations such as ANSI, copyright antics by the Blue People as Carl Malamud calls them, are rarely accompanied by gripping images.

That’s not to denigrate stories with a strong visual element but to say tools are needed to improve newsgathering and verification of not terribly visual stories.

The video has a good “beat” to it. 😉

Entire video is 42 seconds.

Enjoy!

Verification around the world: From Kenya to Hong Kong by Tom Trewinnard.

From the post:

Misinformation around news on the social web is a truly global issue and around the world there are many groups and projects rising to the verification challenge. Here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive run down of a few projects we at Meedan have been watching recently.

Have you seen any great international verification efforts that we’ve missed? Share them with us in the comments here or at @FirstDraftNews on Twitter.
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Seven very good examples of verification from a variety of news outlets.

You don’t want to include false information in your topic maps.

How do you verify information for inclusion?

When you debunk rumors or uncover false information, how do you share it with others?