Every week, we provide interesting links from around the web that discuss issues regarding the verification processes of content from social media. Here is our list for this week.

 

 

Journalist’s checklist for verifying YouTube videos

We’ve mentioned it here before: Amnesty International launched a new website, Citizen Evidence Lab, which assists journalists in verifying user-generated videos. There is also a step-by-step guide on how to „systematically assess citizen video from YouTube for use in research and advocacy.“

The idea behind this step-by-step guide is to collect as much information about a YouTube video as possible and to then create a pdf document „which can be saved together with the assessed video, or shared with other researchers or experts to aid with further investigations.“ We checked it out and these are some of our findings:

Firstly, you can find detailed steps from assessing the source to assessing the content in order to verify YouTube videos.

• Once you pick a video, you can actually go through the steps in the Human Rights Citizen Video Assessment tool and answer all the questions raised, such as: „When was the YouTube account that hosts the video created?“ Or „How many videos have been previously posted by this user?“

Secondly, you can find great tutorials, e.g.:

• How to download and preserve YouTube videos before they might get deleted
• How to perform reverse image search

Moreover, other tools are outlined, e.g.:

• YouTube Video Downloader
• YouTube Data Viewer
• Look up historical weather conditions

And, last but not least, you can find further links, e.g.:

• That can help verify videos, such as this one

At the end of the assessment, you get a detailed summary of all your findings in a PDF or Word document that you can use for further verification steps. The Citizen Evidence Lab will not verify content on YouTube. However, it can help you go through all the steps necessary in order to check for authenticity.

Source: Amnesty International

 

Funding for verification projects     

The Knight Foundation is funding projects which focus on verification processes for journalists. One project is called Checkdesk, which is specifically interesting as it is aiming to help „journalists verify emerging online media during breaking news situations“. Checkdesk is  already proving its value in verification of images about the MH17 disaster.

Source: Knight Foundation, Journalism.co.uk and Checkdesk

 

Global Fact-Checking Summit

Already one month ago, but still relevant to see the „who is who“ of fact-checkers from six continents and more than 20 countries – at the Global Fact-Checking Summit.

Source: Washington Post