Here, we provide interesting links from around the web that discuss issues regarding the verification of content from social media: what tools, services and initiatives are there? Who is doing what? What’s the state of affairs regarding eyewitness media and related issues? Here is our list for this week.

 

Verification as principle tool of journalism

In this article, İbrahim Alatay talks about the verification process as the essence of journalism, highlighting some very important principles, such as “Never add anything that was not there” or “Be as transparent as possible about methods as well as motives.” İbrahim Alatay also refers to two journalists, Kovach and Rosenstiel, who have done a lot of work in this regard. Kovach and Rosenstiel both highlight that “The discipline of verification, and particularly the notion of transparency, is one of the most powerful steps journalists can take […]”.

Source: Poynter

 

Amnesty international’s YouTube DataViewer

Ever wondered how to find out when a video was first uploaded onto YouTube? Especially when there are multiple scrapes of the same video, it can be difficult to determine when the original video had been uploaded. This is where Amnesty International’s tool for YouTube comes in. All you have to do is copy and paste the video ID into the tool and it will display the upload time. The thumbnails that the tool finds can then be used to search for other (read earlier) publications of the same video using Google reverse image search.

Source: YouTube Dataviewer

 

Eyewitness Media at Sky News

Great article by Alastair Reid, Managing Editor at FirstDraftNews. Here, Hazel Baker, digital editor for newsgathering at Sky News’s UK offices. is explaining how they are handling eyewitness media while stories are evolving.

Source: FirstDraftNews

 

6 tips to debunk

This is an important list to go over for your verification work. It includes tips like “Learn basic photo-checking” and “Find someone on the ground”.

Source: Poynter

 

Can GAMIFICATION help in daily work using Social Media ?

Take part in our REVEAL survey and help us find out whether elements of gamification could be helpful while working with Social Media

Source: SAG

 

REVEAL Events

Many of the REVEAL members have been very busy over the past months by attending conferences and visiting several events. Here are some of the highlights you might be interested in:

• REVEAL@ EC’s Media Literacy EG Meeting: On 1 December 2015 Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle participated in the Media Literacy Expert Group Meeting of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, in Brussels.
• REVEAL @ WIFS 2015: On 16 November 2015 Markos Zampoglou of CERTH-ITI and Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle participated in the Thematic Meeting “Multimedia Truthfulness Verification in Legal Environment and Social Media”, co-located with WIFS 2015, in Rome, Italy.
• REVEAL @ ICT 2015: From 20 – 22 October 2015, we attended the ICT 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal. We presented our first prototypes of software that aims to help both community managers (the enterprise scenario) and journalists (the journalism scenario) with semi-automated verification of Social Media content.
• REVEAL @ Prix Italia: On 21 September 2015, REVEAL was represented in the session “News and User-Generated Content” at Prix Italia 2015. The panel discussed the impact of eyewitness media on the news business, what has changed in the past, and how to deal with respective challenges now and in the future. This provided an ideal opportunity to also showcase some of our REVEAL activities.
• REVEAL @ news:rewired: On 16 July 2015 we attended news:rewired, a one-day conference organised by journalism.co.uk in London. We had the opportunity to present REVEAL and participate in a panel discussion that dealt with sourcing stories on Social Media. Obviously, verification of eyewitness material played a big role.