Tools for verifying and assessing the validity of social media and user-generated content by Josh Stearns.
From the post:
“Interesting if true” is the old line about some tidbit of unverified news. Recast as “Whoa, if true” for the Twitter age, it allows people to pass on rumors without having to perform even the most basic fact-checking — the equivalent of a whisper over a quick lunch. Working journalists don’t have such luxuries, however, even with the continuous deadlines of a much larger and more competitive media landscape. A cautionary tale was the February 2015 report of the death of billionaire Martin Bouygues, head of a French media conglomerate. The news was instantly echoed across the Web, only to be swiftly retracted: The mayor of the village next to Bouygues’s hometown said that “Martin” had died. Alas, it was the wrong one.
The issue has become even knottier in the era of collaborative journalism, when nonprofessional reporting and images can be included in mainstream coverage. The information can be crucial — but it also can be wrong, and even intentionally faked. For example, two European publications, Bild and Paris Match, said they had seen a video purportedly shot within the Germanwings flight that crashed in March 2015, but doubts about such a video’s authenticity have grown. (Of course, there is a long history of image tampering, and news organizations have been culpable year after year of running — and even producing — manipulated images.)
The speed of social media and the sheer volume of user-generated content make fact-checking by reporters even more important now. Thankfully, a wide variety of digital tools have been developed to help journalists check facts quickly. This post was adapted from VerificationJunkie, a directory of tools for assessing the validity of social-media and user-generated content. The author is Josh Stearns, director of the journalism sustainability project at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
The big data crowd added veracity as a fourth V some time ago but veracity isn’t the same thing as verification. Veracity is a question of how much credit do you given the data. Verification is the process of determining the veracity of the data. Different activity with different tools.
Josh also maintains Verification Junkie, of which this post is a quick summary.
Don’t limit verification to social media only. Whatever the source, check the “facts” that it claims. You may be surprised.