the prevalent use of online social platforms such as Twitter has altered the process of news information sharing from only a journalist created and revised content to a user-generated content with low or no guidelines or regulations to ensure quality and credibility of content. This fact is not necessarily negative, user-generated news content is useful as a mean of quick reporting of a breaking event from multiple eyewitnesses. However, this system is highly prone to the spread of misinformation and rumors without a well-established technique to prevent these types of undesirable content.
One implication of the prevalence of user-generated news media is that these media became a fertile ground for promoting the spread alternative media websites, or became by themselves a source of alternative media. In her work Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter, Kate Starbird found in Twitter a gold mine from where she extracted some highly informative insights about alternative media sources and inferred valuable relations between these sources from the posting activity of Twitter users who include them in their tweets.
Starbird’s analysis represents a valuable step towards understanding and revealing some truths about alternative media websites. Her work inspires me and creates multiple questions. One question is how do alternative media contribute to shaping the knowledge and perceptions of the public? In other words, sometimes alternative media could contribute positively even if driven by a political agenda. One obvious example could be the information spread during the Egyptian revolution. In the early days of the revolution in January 2011, all the mainstream media was spreading information that was proven to be incorrect later, while a majority of news shared through alternative media that could be usually dubious has shown to be correct.
In many parts of the world, it is hard to judge what type of media is conveying credible news, as many political agendas may be driving both mainstream and alternative media sources. There must be a mean of verifying the information that reaches an individual, and sometimes a healthy amount of skepticism is required. An interesting factor to study could be the deviance in alternative media. We may try to study the most shared alternative media sources in terms of how credible they are across a period of time, and compare this to some of the mainstream media sources. One of the main challenges could be how o guarantee a neutrality of judgment.
Another suggestion would be to design social systems that encourage users to be healthily skeptical of the news that reaches them by encouraging them to verify the news through easy tasks such as a Google search. Such a design could assign a credibility score of a user that increases as this user verifies the news before sharing. Imagine that beside the share button, there is a “verify” button that when clicked, retrieves the top n relevant links from a Google search and extracts some keywords that may indicate how credible the news is. If a user presses the verify button, the news will be flagged as “credible and safe to share” or “needs more verification” or maybe “highly dubious”. As the user verifies more, he becomes a more credible user as he shares verified news.
It is hard to judge what type of media carries the truth, but it is always possible to go an extra mile and verify before sharing. This might not be as easy as it seems because a user may be blinded by a piece of news that reinforces his opinion about something.
