I come from a country where things don’t run too smoothly most of the time. There are constant run ins with security forces and the army. Strikes, protests and sit ins are part of our daily routine, and the number of times government is either replaced, or resigns per year is higher than our yearly GDP growth percentage (that is not an exaggeration). So keeping up with all the news is tiresome, as you find yourself constantly missing important pieces of information. More worrying though, is that in a highly privatized news sector that lacks a defined structure for supervision and doesn’t set any kind of standards, much of what you read is biased, and agenda-driven reporting. As a result, there are numerous incidents where the content used to report a story is falsified. But this problem does not only exist where I come from. Yes, the extent to which it has been abused here is such that we saw news channels running images or videos taken from an entirely different country — let alone date and time — and posting them as their own footage, but my point is that falsifying images is common practice among individuals and news agencies everywhere (see Malaysia and North Korea) and that makes me very uneasy. The result of this discovery is that I barely trust content that is shown to me from news outlets anymore.
I tried turning to alternative methods: Twitter was the main one and honestly, and although I do admit Twitter can be better, it still has countless pitfalls. It has its positives too, for example if I want to follow individuals that can tweet events real-time for me then its perfect, and I can choose who I want to follow, giving me an added level of control on how I receive information. The problem is that I still don’t know that what they’re saying is true, let alone if the content they’re posting is verified. I have to take it on good faith that this person is telling the truth, and showing me images or videos that are true (based on information like how many followers he/she has and if he/she is verified). But unless you’re truly innocent, taking everyone on good faith just isn’t possible. And because I have nothing to verify what someone is Tweeting, I can easily choose to not believe it if I don’t want to, especially if the person is saying something that contradicts what I believe, be it political, spiritual or even personal. I personally know of an activist that was illegally arrested by Central Security Forces (illegally arrested because there were no grounds to arrest her on), but when she tweeted an image of herself in prison, she provoked an outrage of skeptical responses accusing her of lying to sully the image of the Central Security Forces and Police system. A picture is no longer hard enough evidence, and its totally understandable as I’ve already explained.
But let’s say that everyone on Twitter is honest, and everyone believed the Tweets they’re reading, even then though, people make mistakes. Superstorm Sandy was the perfect example of how human error can have a rather large impact in delivering misleading news. In this instance a few images of what was supposedly the storm were uploaded, and as an act of warning each other, people began circulating them on different social networks including Twitter. Turns out these images that were taken weren’t real but by the time someone had figured that out they had already gone viral and were even used by reporters and news agencies to report the story.
If the point I’m trying to make isn’t clear enough yet, let me come out and say it, and I can’t stress this enough: a lot of the content we are shown cannot be verified. We don’t really know where it comes from, and whether or not its source and authenticity are true. To the average reader that might be OK, but I am not an average reader. I want the truth. I want whoever I’m following or reading to be credible, and I want to trust what that person is showing me. And I want everyone to demand that. We have a right to demand the truth from whomever claims the responsibility of showing it to us, and I just don’t feel we’re getting that right now.
Good news (pun intended) though, because from all this negativity came an idea, and from this idea grew a genuine attempt to offer a solution. What if I told you I could offer you a platform to view and upload content that could be verified? Content whose source and authenticity was confirmed?
Along with my 2 co-founders, I created a mobile application that allows you to upload and view content on a map that is tagged by date, time and location. This information is stamped on the content itself, along with our App Icon so that you know it was verified by us. You cannot choose the locations yourself like on Twitter, or any of the other social networks, and if you don’t turn on your location services then it won’t let you capture anything. Also, you can’t upload anything that was taken beforehand or outside of the application (because then it won’t have been tagged, preventing us from verifying it). We let you do all this anonymously so that you’re free from judgement, but also because if you’re exposing something potentially dangerous, then it can’t be traced back to you.
Whether you want to post or view authentic images of the weather, travel destinations you’re planning on visiting, or political events you want to cover or learn more about, Mapture gives you the platform to do all of those and much more. If you own an iOS device give it a go right now by downloading it from the App Store (coming soon to Android), as this is our first version and we want you to try it out to give us feedback on how to improve it.
We’re going to change the way people use photos, in a very big way. Be a part of it. Let us know what you think.
Contact us on bahaa@maptureapp.com
