Practical Tactics to fight misinformation for Journalists on Twitter
Keeping an eye for fake news is a a daunting for journalists in the digital era. Every sixty seconds according to Smart Insights as highlighted below, 3.3 million posts were shared on Facebook and 29 million messages were shared on Whatsapp in 2016 in contrast to 2.4 million Facebook posts and 12.5 million Whatsapp messages in 2014.
Fake News, often refers to fabricated news and can be found in traditional news, social media or fake news websites, with no basis in fact, but is presented as being factually accurate.According to the First Draft News fake news is in most cases represented in these seven forms:
- Satire or parody with no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool.
- False connection. This is when headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content
- Misleading content which uses information to frame an issue or an individual.
- False content. This is when genuine content is shared with false contextual information.
- Imposter content occurs when genuine sources are impersonated with false, made-up sources.
- Manipulated content occurs when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive for instance as with a “doctored” photo.
- Fabricated content. This refers to new content that is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm.
Fake news often trumps the truth because it’s messengers have mastered the art of having the loudest voice. This however doesn’t imply that’s it’s impossible to spot fake news. It’s important to identify checks and balances for any incoming news items to ensure that it’s sources and supporting sources are credible, the information is correctly dated and is void of any biases. In this new age of digital journalism, fact-checking is not something you sometimes do; it’s part of your-day-to-day workflow as a journalist.
And here’s a few tips, tricks and tactics to ensure a frictionless integration of fact-checking to your workflow:
Verifying Twitter Information
Twitter’s advanced search provides access to search filtering tools as below:
2. Twitter Search API documentation
The Twitter search API offers three tiers of search APIs. The Standard search API searches against a sampling of recent Tweets published in the past 7 days, the Premium search API offers both free and paid access to the last 30 days of Tweets while the Enterprise search API provides Paid (and managed) access to either the last 30 days of Tweets, or access to the entire Tweet archive. The Twitter search documentation, enables you to refine twitter search queries.
Foller.me allows you to take a close look at a Twitter account. It provides a general overview of a profiles information and statistics. Spam accounts and robots tend to get suspended after a couple of weeks, identifying the account’s join date is key in building a credibility score for the profile in question. You can also access topic hashtags and mentions data as profiles interacting with a particular account, tweet sentiment and engagement analysis as well as a bar chart showing the activity time based on the latest tweets. This will help you identify any irregularities in tweeting habits.
4. Speak directly to the source
Try and speak directly to the source of a particular news item, ask for their off-Twitter contact details where you can speak in private, know if they were first hand witnesses, if they know other witnesses and whether or not they have supporting evidence, in terms of pictures or video. Where video or images are present, be sure to look out for distinctive features such as what people are wearing, vehicle number plates, any distinctive landmarks that can help you confirm the story. You can also cross-check landmarks against Google Earth and cross reference this with a tweet’s geo-location.
It is also important to audit the authenticity of a tweet. Look out for poor grammar, typos which will in most time be an indication of a real person being behind the tweets. It also helps to identify other people tweeting or reporting the same story and crowdsource for supporting information from them.
The Jeffrey’s Image Metadata Viewer, enables you to identify details under which a photo was taken. Modern digital cameras encode a lot of such data such as shutter speed, lens focal length, into the image file, generally called “Exif Data” which stands for “Exchangeable Image File Format”.
6. TwXplorer
TwXplorer will enable you to find the hash tags being used for a breaking story since for any search terms you enter into twXplorer, you get four different ways to see your search results:
- Up to 500 recent tweets containing the terms you entered.
- In tweets that include your search terms, a bar graph showing the most popular other words that appear.
- The most popular hashtags included in tweets containing your search terms
- The most popular links in tweets containing your search terms.
7. Twlets
Using Twlets you are able to access any public user’s tweets and likes, followers and following, members info of any of their lists and replies to their recent tweets in a downloadable excel document. This allows you to do interesting Natural Language processing in Excel to for instance, sort the tweets in chronological in order, capture a flood and share it with your friends, or check out the most popular tweets from a given account.
8. Quarter Tweets. You can use quarter tweets to perform Geo-based Twitter searches.
This free toolkit is provided by the InVID’s European project to help journalists verify content on social networks . It has been designed to help journalists to save time and be more efficient in their fact-checking and debunking tasks on social networks especially when verifying videos and images.
The provided tools allow you to quickly get contextual information on videos, to perform reverse image search on Google, Baidu or Yandex search engines, to fragment videos from various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Daily Motion) into keyframes, to enhance and explore keyframes and images through a magnifying lens, to query Twitter more efficiently through time intervals and many other filters, to read video and image metadata, and to apply forensic filters on still images.
Don’t be caught in the rush to break the news first, integrating these easy to use tools in your work-cycle will ensure that you’re output is both credible as well as contribute towards fighting misinformation online.
Stay tuned for the next instalment in this series on how to identify and verify information, images and video found on Facebook and other social media platforms.
The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.
Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.
Hacker-journalists try and bridge the two worlds. Hacks/Hackers Africa aims to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of our world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload and collapse of traditional business models for legacy media, their work has become even more crucial.
