Technology: Check:Verify breaking news online checkmedia.org
Demo leader: Tianyi Li
Summary:
Check is a web-based tool on Meedan’s platform for collaborative verification of digital media. It was founded in 2011 as Checkdesk, and adopted this new name in 2016. They have worked to build online tools, support independent journalists, and develop media literacy training resources that aim to improve the investigative quality of citizen journalism and help limit the rapid spread of rumors and misinformation online. It combines smart checklists, workflow integrations, and intuitive design to support an efficient and collaborative process. It was used during Electionland, which is a collaborative project held during the US elections to look at and report on voting access across the country on Election Day and the days leading up to it.
People can post media links in their project on Check, and invite others to investigate and verify the contents. Check provides a web interface for people to add annotation notes, set verification status, add tags (not working) and add different types of tasks for each link. To investigate in Check, you should first set up a new account and create a team. You can create multiple teams and join other people’s team. In each team, you can set up projects for specific investigations for your team. Each project allows you add items, like social media posts or web sites, that you are investigating. There are four different roles in Check, team owner, team editor, journalist and contributor. Different level of access and permissions are granted to each role. Details on user role here.
Check is a open-source project and offers its API on Github. The project uses Ruby on Rails (or simply Rails, is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License.) They both Docker (software container platform) based or non-Docker-based installation for you to deploy the project on your local machine. Other applications can communicate with this service (and test this communication) using the client library, which can be automatically generated. People can also use functions exposed by this application in the client library.
Limitation: They now only support Chrome.
Demo:
- Create a new account
- Visit https://checkmedia.org/ on Google Chrome only
- Set up a new account. You can:
- Authorize your account with an existing social media platform (currently that’s Facebook, Twitter or Slack)
- Set up a new account with your email address
- Create a team
- Type in a Team Name.
- Type in a Team URL.
- Join a team: https://checkmedia.org/investigative-tech/join
- Create a new project
- From your project page, click on “Add Project”
- Start typing the name of the new project. (Don’t worry, you can change this later)
- Hit Enter/Return
- Add a link for Investigation
- Click on the project name on the left. This opens up your project workspace.
- Click on the bottom line, where it says “Paste a Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube link”
- Here, you can drop in a link from any of these social networks (soon, you’ll be able to add any link!)
- Click “Post”
- This will create a page for investigation of the link.
- Annotating a link
- Add a note:
- In the bar at the bottom, type a note. For instance, type “I am looking into the exact location for this Tweet.”
- Click Submit
- This will add your note.
- Others in your team can also add notes as they collaborate on the investigation.
- Set verification status:
- In the upper left hand corner of the link, click on the blue “Undetermined” dropdown.
- Choose a status
- This sets the status and adds a note to the log
- Add a note:
-
- Add a tag:
- Add the bottom of your media, click on the “…” and choose edit
- (I don’t think this function works…)
- Add a tag:
- Add a task to the link under investigation:
- Go to the media page and click “Add task” link.
- Choose a type from the list
