Fake news quiz, the pace of lies online and OSINT analysis
Hi everyone,
A mystery and particularly vindictive bug has temporarily laid waste to some of our brightest minds this week, so unfortunately the individual videos from the recent training at the New York Times aren’t quite ready yet.
If you missed it, you can still watch the full, unedited video of #FDLive on our YouTube channel though, with talks on setting up your newsroom for breaking news, verification tools and techniques, and the blight of fake information on social media.
In the mean time, here’s what we’ve been working on this week:
- The fake news quiz is back with an edition covering stories in April. The average score is currently at 69%, think you can do better?
- Recent research has proven what we’ve known for a while: lies travel faster than the truth. The science shows it travels much further and faster than we thought, however. Craig Silverman has the details.
What else was there?
The excellent folks over at Ukrainian debunking site StopFake have put together a range of tips for anyone researching the Russian internet who doesn’t speak Russian which is definitely worth your time; Bellingcat’s Nick Waters broke down how he analysed a video of an alleged attack in Ukraine; Niqash investigated how incitement on social media may have contributed to the death of 60 people in Northern Iraq; and verification is all well and good but, to quote a saying as old as Rome, who will watch the watchers? Indeed, who will debunk the debunkers? Daniel Engber at FiveThirtyEight went to find out.
Until next week, all the best and stay true,
Alastair
Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
