Two years ago, for a research project I was working on, I talked to journalists about the ways user-generated content was handled in their newsrooms. During one interview, an editor actually recreated the groan that went around the news meetings whenever she brought up the “v-word.” She was talking about verification. As we stumble towards the end of 2016, with everyone obsessing over misinformation, I don’t think you’d find any newsroom referring to verification in this way. I would hope not, anyway.
I predict newsrooms will make social discovery and verification skills something they specifically seek in new hires in 2017. This is not the time to be fooled by a photoshopped image, mistaken when a video emerges with fake BBC branding, or crediting the wrong person on screen because an image emerged on Twitter when it actually originated in a WhatsApp group and was captured by someone completely different.
The misinformation ecosystem is much more nuanced than simply fake news. Over the weekend, I saw the inevitable backlash against the term “fake news.” But as Alexios Mantzarlis of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network pointed out on Twitter: “the fact that so many are misusing the term ‘fake news’ doesn’t mean it’s not a thing at all.” We need to agree a taxonomy to explain the complexities of the misinformation ecosystem. Until we do that, our attempts at finding solutions are becoming circular.
As I explained in a recent piece for CJR, during this U.S. election I counted six different, but specific types of misinformation, from “real” content used in the wrong context, to photoshopped images, to video content using branding from mainstream media, to parody content. The full spectrum of misinformation is much broader and I predict we’ll see work to create a definitive typology so we can have a shared understanding of what we mean when we use different terms.
Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat has already shown what is possible when social discovery and verification techniques are applied on long-form investigative questions. The work of Eliot and his team to investigate the downing of flight MH17 using clues that emerged on social media demonstrated what is possible.
ProPublica’s Electionland project, an initiative with which First Draft was directly involved, also demonstrated what is possible. With an army of 660 students at 14 journalism schools, all trained in social verification techniques, we were able to find and corroborate over 1,000 reports which emerged on social media during election day.
We hope to use similar methodologies to monitor the French election in the runup to the April polling day, and are in the planning stages of a project to map hate crimes in the U.S. and to monitor the German election as well.
We often take the blue verification tick for granted, but one day it became the way we judged the quality of an account across different social networks. It’s an example of an accepted visual grammar. As the arguments swirl about fake news and the misinformation ecosystem, and as social networks push back on the idea that they will ever be the arbiters of truth, the inevitable next step, I hope, is that we will see visual cues on content that will allow users to navigate the content they discover via the social web themselves. These visual cues would allow a new level of transparency around content: for example, allowing users to judge how long a piece of content has been circulating; allowing users to see whether the content was shared by someone who has previously had content flagged on a social network; or at the most basic, allowing users to see when was the content first created — for example, when the domain was registered.
My hope is that these new visual cues are created collaboratively, with designers from all the social networks taking advice from social psychologists on the most effective standardised visual flags. As Chris Blow from Meedan argues, we need to think about positive visual cues, rather than simply negative red “debunked” or “fake” stamps on images.
Just after the Paris attacks of November 2015, I wrote a post expressing dismay that while news organizations often published roundup listicles after breaking news events (e.g. “5 hoaxes you shouldn’t have fallen for during the Paris attacks”), this type of work was not being undertaken in realtime on the social platforms themselves. Comments in response to the post pointed me to some of the amazing work happening in France around realtime debunking. If you haven’t seen it (and can speak French!) I would really recommend taking a look at Les Decodeurs, the Verifie Twitter account from Buzzfeed France, and the Instant Redux TV segment on France Info.
BuzzFeed in the U.S. followed this model during the U.S. election, often sharing realtime debunks. During the first debate, when Donald Trump denied that he’d ever said that global warming was created by the Chinese, a photoshopped tweet started doing the rounds saying that the Trump team had deleted a tweet that said exactly that from 2012. That assertion was false and BuzzFeed quickly debunked it on Twitter before the debate had ended.
A question remains whether newsrooms should debunk information on the social web. If they don’t do it for all information, audiences might conclude that something is true if they don’t see the debunk. However, I would argue that during a breaking news story, newsrooms should collaborate around the hoaxes that always do the rounds, whether it’s the pictures of comedian Sam Hyde popping up after active shooting situations, old imagery re-circulating after natural disasters, or people falsely claiming to be victims of an attack looking for media attention. My hope for 2017 is that newsrooms will start to collaborate in realtime on debunking efforts, which will save precious time and resources and free up journalists to guide audiences through the torrent of misinformation that emerges when a news event breaks.
Claire Wardle is former research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, now working at First Draft.
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
David Weigel A test for online speech
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis