By Kevin Donnellan at Storyful
When we talk about verification of content on the web, we sometimes tend to focus on hard news only. But verification can, and should, be applied to anything that is being reported, no matter how throwaway it may seem. Leaving aside the debate about what constitutes news (though I do like this take) here are a few pretty lightweight pieces of content that benefited from a little extra digging.
The Reddit Post
A Reddit/Imgur post titled “I was a bit surprised to see Finn from Star Wars on a poster at my University” attracted over 280,000 views back on January 8, while we were all still consumed with The Force Awakens mania. On its own it was pretty interesting, but it wasn’t a story without a little more digging. Most importantly, we needed to know if the photo actually showed John Boyega, who played Finn? Was it a real image or photoshopped? Who took the image? A Google Reverse Image Search eventually led to the original on Getty Images and a look at the photographer’s Facebook page confirmed it was, indeed, John Boyega. Ten minutes’ work and an interesting image becomes an interesting story. But without that follow-up it’s just pointing to a Reddit thread.
The Crazy YouTube video
Footage of a man and bear wrestling got millions of views in January of this year, but the video existed in two separate ways online. There was the original version, which credited Orphaned Wildlife Center employee Jim Kowalczik as the man wrestling with a bear. Then there was a second, scraped, video on YouTube that gained over 600,000 views before it was removed. The YouTube channel appeared to be Russian, which led many viewers, and some sites, to report the video as “Russian man wrestles bear.”
I spent longer than I care to admit using Russian language keywords in searches for this mysterious man. Eventually a simple search of “man, bear” on Facebook uncovered a post from a bear trainer who knew the real source. From there it was easy to find the original video and a name for the trainer. Again, a little research gives us original content and a potential interviewee, instead of just a scraped video with a misleading title.
The Funny Photo
Yes, this Spiderman/Uncle Ben photo is just a dumb joke, but it’s a dumb joke that somebody went to the effort of creating. It got widely shared on Reddit, Imgur and Twitter this month with no obvious credit given. But this was one of the rare occasions when it paid to read the comments. Clicking on the Reddit uploader’s name revealed his follow-up answers on the image, where he said that it had come from a friend named Tony. A Twitter account for the Redditor gave extra info on this Tony and soon we had an original source to point to.
The To-Good-to-Be-True Quote
The above tweet is an obvious joke, but the image still got shared as a real James Cameron quote on Twitter. This is becoming a category in itself and is popular with comics on social media raised on a diet of The Onion. From Bill Murray planning a heist with Wu Tang Clan to Bill Clinton making crazy comments to Tony Blair and, as above, viral James Cameron quotes around planned Avatar sequels, Twitter is full of fantastical quotes or stories shared in a deadpan manner. So what can you do? Well, is the text shared as a screenshot with no link? Can you find the original quote in a news story? Is the earliest example of the quote from a Twitter account with a history of comic tweets? If you answered yes, no and yes then you’re probably looking at a fake quote. It could still be a story, but one where you are warning your audience rather than falling for a gag.
The 🔥 🔥 🔥 Tweet
In September of last year the above video, tweeted by Brock Hersch, reached over 40,000 retweets in seven hours. With such a deluge of notifications it was unlikely we would hear back from Hersch for background information. But given the popularity of the video with students it was likely that a member of one of the mystery professor’s classes would comment on it on social. Sure enough, a Twitter search for “my” and “professor” directed us to two students and we then had a name for this brilliant new viral star.
These are just five examples from the daily avalanche of content to sift through. A little extra digging may not nab you a Pulitzer, but it will add value to your stories.
Kevin Donnellan is Trends Editor at Storyful. For more information on Storyful, visit storyful.com or follow us on Twitter.
