Social Media Verification and Discovery Makes for Better Reporting

My experience at Storyful and ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project taught me a thing or two

Photo by Mar Newhall on Unsplash

For a while I had a love-hate relationship with social media. Now, I see it as a critical tool for investigative work.

I’m a recent graduate of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and an intern on the news team at Storyful, a social media verification newswire that focuses on video. During my time in graduate school, my cohort helped with ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project by scouring the internet for unreported incidents of hate crimes that could be added to a database for local journalists to use. The FBI’s information on hate crimes is currently incomplete. With the help of 100 newsroom partners, five journalism schools and civil rights groups, the project was a collaborative effort to fix that. After finding an incident of hate online, we submitted it into a collaborative reporting tool called Check.

But we couldn’t submit just anything. We had to do our best to verify the information first for ProPublica journalists and partners to use. Along with my experience at Storyful, I learned a few things along the way about social media verification and discovery.

Social news discovery entails more than simple Googling. Social media wasn’t designed by journalists. These platforms weren’t created to mine for information that they can use in their reports. For this reason, social media discovery can get pretty difficult. For something like Documenting Hate, I had to think critically about the search terms that I was using to dig up posts about discrimination. It was a requirement to think like someone else — namely, a person who would hurt someone physically or with discriminatory language. It was uncomfortable to think of these derogatory terms but that’s how I was able to pull up some (disturbing) results.

One particular challenge I had was looking for hate speech. There was (an alarming) saturation of offensive language on Facebook and Twitter posts but these weren’t necessarily incidents of intimidation or hate, “today, I yelled [offensive term] because they’re a [offensive term]” or “Last week someone screamed [offensive term] at me near Starbucks on 8th street.” This kind of work requires the patience to sift through some noise to get proper results.

I also used platforms like Reddit and Quora. One angle I took for searching was trying to see if people who experienced hate were seeking counsel on online forums. From there, I would try to see if people responded with their own experiences with hate and work from there. While I had to think like a discriminatory person, I also put myself in the shoes of the victim.

While doing this kind of work, you rarely, if ever, get a gold mine of endless relevant results. But thinking of different approaches to searching could prove useful, especially since you’re less likely to find something without thinking differently.

Finding supplemental information to verify the information in a video is a staple of being a reporter at Storyful. Sometimes, that includes finding local news reports or social media posts that talk about the same event. For Documenting Hate, finding corroborating evidence was just as important but much more challenging. Posts about an incident don’t always have a photo or video attached. Without any visual aids as starting points, it was hard to confirm whether or not incidences really happened.

One example is a tweet I found by a woman who said she was profiled by TSA at an airport for wearing a hijab. I was able to find her Facebook page but she and her friends didn’t post anything about that particular incident.Without further evidence to support her tweet, I wasn’t able to add the entry on Check as confirmed. However, finding other social media profiles can also be a starting point to confirm someone’s identity.

Sometimes, all a reporter can do is get in contact with a person to check it out themselves. But if journalists make it a point to add social media verification as part of their toolkit, it can help build a foundation for better reporting.

I had to block out a few hours a week to work on this project. There were days that I didn’t get anything worth submitting.

Understanding social media’s initial purpose — connectivity and sharing — was important for me to think of ways I could utilize these platforms as a reporter. In an age of widespread misinformation, it’s going to take more digging to find the gems we can use and more time to verify the things that we find. As journalists should be prepared to meet that challenge.

Writer and journalist. CUNY J-School survivor. Audience engagement fellow at Politico. Arts, journalism and community. kristineish.com