Accelerating the Verification of Social Media Content

Journalists have already been developing a multitude of tactics to verify user-generated content shared on social media. As noted here, the BBC has a dedicated User-Generated Content (UGC) Hub that is tasked with verifying social media information. The UK Guardian, Al-Jazeera, CNN and others are also developing competency in what I refer to as “information forensics”. It turns out there are many tactics that can be used to try and verify social media content. Indeed, applying most of these existing tactics can be highly time consuming.

So building a decision-tree that combines these tactics is the way to go. But doing digital detective work online is still a time-intensive effort. Numerous pieces of digital evidence need to be collected in order to triangulate and ascertain the veracity of just one given report. We therefore need tools that can accelerate the processing of a verification decision-tree. To be sure, information is the most perishable commodity in a crisis—for both journalists and humanitarian pro-fessionals. This means that after a certain period of time, it no longer matters whether a report has been verified or not because the news cycle or crisis has unfolded further since.

This is why I’m a fan of tools like Rapportive. The point is to have the decision-tree not only serve as an instruction-set on what types of evidence to collect but to actually have a platform that collects that information. There are two general strategies that could be employed to accelerate and scale the verification process. One is to split the tasks listed in the decision-tree into individual micro-tasks that can be distributed and independently completed using crowdsourcing. A second strategy is to develop automated ways to collect the evidence.

Of course, both strategies could also be combined. Indeed, some tasks are far better suited for automation while others can only be carried about by humans. In sum, the idea here is to save journalists and humanitarians time by considerably reducing the time it takes to verify user-generated content posted on social media. I am also particularly interested in gamification approaches to solve major challenges, like the Protein Fold It game. So if you know of any projects seeking to solve the verification challenge described above in novel ways, I’d be very grateful for your input in the comments section below. Thank you!