I Participated in a Nationwide Investigative Journalism Project, And You Can Too

How I got involved with ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project and what I learned in the process.

Source: propublica.org

Getting the chance to participate in a nationwide investigation was not something I was expecting to be able to do when I first enrolled at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. So far, however, I’ve been able to do it twice, both times with ProPublica, a non profit news organization with a focus on investigative work in the interest of the public.

First, my social journalism class and I participated in the organization’s maternal mortality investigation, a nationwide effort to collect stories from people impacted by maternal mortality in the US. In doing so, ProPublica hoped to gain a better understanding of why the country’s maternal mortality rate is so high.

Then, this summer, we got the opportunity to contribute to ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project. Because there’s no reliable data when it comes to hate crimes and bias incidents in the US, ProPublica sought (and continues) to create a national database of these incidents using data provided through outreach and callout submissions. It has also partnered up with 100 newsrooms to develop stories based on the data and stories collected.

As student participants in the project, our job would be to find and verify social media posts calling out acts of hate and bias incidents alleging to have taken place since the election of President Donald Trump. We’d use Facebook, Facebook Signal, Tweetdeck, Banjo and Crowdtangle to find social media posts calling out hate crimes, verify these callouts and use a platform called Check, developed by Meedan, to input all the information we could find surrounding each incident. Data input into Check would then be verified and before being shared with partner news organizations for potential coverage.

After getting social discovery and verification training from P. Kim Bui, a NowThis producer and ProPublica project leader and Rachel Glickhouse, ProPublica’s partner manager and a social-j alumna, our class set out to find and verify social media posts calling out hate crimes. We agreed to each spend 3 hours a week on this work, but few of us could quite get the hang of discovery, much less using Check.

We decided to change our work flow after my colleague, Jennifer Groff, and I were invited to a Documenting Hate summit in Austin, TX in August. Student participants present at the summit agreed to divide the work by type of harassment, and to contribute at least one hour of work a day per school. We also got refresher trainings on discovery and verification.

It was during these trainings in Austin where I learned about Banjo, a social discovery tool that allows you to find social media posts within the last 24 hours based on keywords and geotags. We also learned how useful Facebook Signal can be for Instagram post searches. How we can use Facebook Live to access a map of all ongoing live streams around the world.

And then, in verifying an incident, we learned that there are three tenets to verification: 1) Location, 2) Who and 3) Date. It’s important to know whether or not there is corroborating information, whether the user appears to be real and whether any shared media has been retouched or is being repurposed from a previous incident. Using tools like reverse Google image searches, Google Street View or Wikimapia can be helpful in these endeavors.

This training came in handy when Jenn and I got back to New York, where the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism geared up to contribute to the project.

Discovery and verification are a lot harder than one might think

In this political and social climate, many of us were surprised at how difficult it was to find callouts of hate crimes and bias incidents on social media. There were days my classmates and I couldn’t find anything, and others where we could find tweets and Facebook posts pointing to something potentially real, before quickly finding out they couldn’t be verified.

There were a several verification success stories, however. Here’s one:

While looking for acts of vandalism called out on social media, I used Tweetdeck to look up the hashtags #vandalized and #mosque one week. I found one tweet, published on July 10th, saying: “I really don’t like my city. Someone vandalized our local mosque with this”

Images displaying the vandalism were also attached to the tweet:

Twitter

As you can see in the images above, vandals appear to have spray painted this mosque with the text: “We are vandal group” and “F*** Allah.”

In order to verify this tweet to the best of my ability, I needed to look into the following three things: 1) Where 2) Who and 3) When. First, I wanted to verify if this was posted by a real Twitter user. The fact that this tweet was liked 13 times and got 4 replies aided this verification process. I also saw that the user had more than 32,000 followers. Good sign. That same user also mentioned, in one of the replies to the tweet, that the vandalism had occurred “today.”

Another comment on the post mentioned that the mosque in question was located in Nashville, so I Googled “Nashville mosque vandalized” and found a link to a Facebook post from the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro with a description of the event and pictures similar to those posted in the original tweet that I’d found:

Islamic Center of Murfreesboro (Facebook)

Doing more research, I also found that a news organization, Nashville Scene, wrote a piece about the vandalism. This tweet was verifiable. I decided I would still input this incident into Check because it didn’t receive much coverage beyond that — this could still be of interest to Documenting Hate’s partner organizations.

3 Key Takeaways from Participating in the Project

  1. Collaborating with other classmates and school teams during this project was incredibly helpful. Throughout the course of this project, we used a shared spreadsheet with successful search terms and strings to assist other students who would might find them useful. Getting suggestions on what tools to use enabled all of us to find more.
  2. Getting creative with the tools at hand is crucial. It was important for us not to limit ourselves to Tweetdeck, as tempting as it was given its familiarity. Facebook Signal, Banjo, Crowdtangle and other tools can be just as useful! (Also great to gain these social media skills!)
  3. We gained social discovery and verification skills that will be useful in many disciplines. Getting to figure out where people are calling things out, if these callouts are real and where to go from there — all of these are really important skills to have, especially as journalists.

You can also get involved!

One of our concerns, as students, was whether or not the events and hate crimes were were learning about via social media would ever get the proper coverage they deserve. If you’re a local reporter in the US, whether that be in TV, radio, online or print, please consider getting involved by using the work we’ve put in, as students, to report on hate crimes and bias incidents in the US.

Thank you

to Rachel Glickhouse, P. Kim Bui, Tom Trewinnard and everyone Meedan and ProPublica for allowing us to participate in this important project. And to our program director, Carrie Brown, for giving us this opportunity.

Social Video Intern @CNN & CUNY-J grad student Formerly: Story Editor @Snap News Editor @MoroccoWorldNews, Twitter: @GhitaTweets