The Verification Handbook

chiguy

Paper:

Chapters 1, 3, 6, and 7 of:
Silverman, C. (Ed.). (2014). The Verification Handbook: A Definitive Guide to Verifying Digital Content for Emergency Coverage. Retrieved from The Verification Handbook
Discussion Leader: Lawrence Warren
 
Summary:
“This book is a guide to help everyone gain the skills and knowledge necessary to work together during critical events to separate news from noise, and ultimately to improve the quality of information available in our society, when it matters most.”

Chapter 1: When Emergency News Breaks

 This section of the book dealt with the perpetuation of rumors whenever a disaster strikes. According to the 8 1/2 Laws of Rumor Spread it is easy to get a good rumor going when we are already anxious about a situation. This problem existed long before the current world of high speed networks and social media and has become a serious thorn in the sides of information verification associates. People at times intentionally spread false rumors at times to be apart of the hot topic and to bolster attention to a social media account or cause which adds yet another layer of problems for information verification. This epidemic is intensified during actual times of crisis when lives hang within the balance of having the correct information. One would think the easiest way to verify data is for professionals to be the ones to disperse information, but the problem is that many times an eye witness will observe a situation long before an actual journalist, and at times a journalist may not have access to the things which are seen first hand. People rely on official sources to provide accurate information in a timely fashion while simultaneously those agencies rely on ordinary people to help source information as well as bring it to context.

Chapter 3: Verifying User Generated Content

The art of gathering news has been transformed by two significant developments; mobile technology and the ever developing social network. In 2013 it was reported that over half of phones sold were smartphones which meant several ordinary people had the capability of recording incidents and taking them to any number of media outlets to be shared with the world. People normally send things to social media as many do not understand the process of handing something off to a news station and they feel more comfortable within their own network of chosen friends. It is also for this same feeling of security why people normally tune into social media during a breaking news update, which is where some people are fed fake news reports because of malicious users intentionally creating fake pages and sites to create a buzz around false facts. Then there are people who find content and claim it as their own which makes it harder to find the original sources at times of inspection. Verification is a skill which all professionals must have in order to help prevent fake news from circulating and it involves 4 items to check and confirm:

  1. Provenance: Is this the original piece of content?
  2. Source: Who uploaded the content?
  3. Date: When was the content created?
  4. Location: Where was the content created?

Chapter 6: Putting the Human Crowd to Work

Crowd sourcing is by no means a new concept and has always been a part of information gathering, but with the rise of social media dynamos, we can now do this on a much larger scale than before. This section of the book lists a few of the best practices for crowd source verification.

Chapter 7: Adding the computer Crowd to the Human Crowd

This section of the book is about the possibility of automating the verification process of information. Advanced computing (human computing and machine computing) is on the rise as machine learning becomes more advanced. Human computing has not yet been used to verifying social media information but with the direction of technology it is not too far away. Machine computing could be used to create verification plug-ins which would help to verify if an entry is likely to be credible.

Reflections:

The book does a good job of trying to be a centralized guideline for information verification in all aspects of the professional world. If all people and agencies used these guidelines then I believe it would remove a great deal of misinformation and would save time of any emergency efforts trying to assist. Decreasing the number of fake reports would help increase productivity of people who are actually trying to help.

This collection of ideals and practices run under the umbrella that professionals do not purposely spread false rumors because they are ethically not supposed to do so. We have seen very extreme views given by several news anchors and show hosts, mostly built on self opinion and have had no backlash or repercussions for what they say. It is my belief that as long as there are people involved in information distribution, there is no real way to stop misinformation from being spread. Ultimately as long as there is a person with an opinion behind some information gathering or distribution it will be impossible to eradicate fake news reports, or even embellished stories.

 Questions:
  • What can we do as individuals to prevent the spread of false reports within our social networks?
  • There is a debate on the effectiveness of algorithms and automated searches against the human element. Will machines ever completely replace humans?
  • Should there be a standard punishment for creating false reports or are the culprits protected by their 1st amendment rights? Are there any exceptions to your position on that idea?
  • Verification is a difficult job that many people work together to get accurate information. Can you imagine a way (other than automation) to streamline information verified?

chiguy

One thought on “The Verification Handbook”

Comments are closed.