NewsandInsight

Ethical and accuracy problems in mining social media for news content


In the latest instalment of her "Backstory" series, Gill Moodie writes exclusively for journalism.co.za:

IS IT OK to use something someone says on Facebook or Twitter in a news story without checking with them first? On the one hand you’d be naive to expect a right to privacy on social networks but, on the other hand, social media is still new to many people so maybe one needs to make allowances for naiveté? 

Is the tweet true or a hoax? Is the person behind it verifiable and is Twitter even an accurate dipstick for the mood of a nation or a community on a controversial issue. One hundred and forty characters lacks context and as news on Twitter sweeps round the globe instantaneously, Twitter users can get increasingly shrill as facts get distorted. 

These are the kind of dilemmas that an enterprising group of journalists in Dublin wrestle with every day. 

You won’t see credits in articles for Storyful – a company started by veteran Irish foreign correspondent Mark Little two years ago – but their clients include  blue chips such as The New York Times and The Economist Group Media Lab. 

“What do you do if you get hold of Facebook photos because you went to university with someone’s boyfriend, for instance?” Storyful’s director of news services, Claire Wardle – who was in South Africa recently to speak at Wits University’s Joburg Radio Day conference  – asked in an interview with  Journalism.co.za. “What if we contact someone to ask: ‘Are you happy for your video of snow in Johannesburg to be used by our news clients?’ and they say they are happy with that. But then two years down the line someone comes to us and says they want to make a documentary on crazy weather patterns and they know we’ve got an archive of content… That person can say: ‘Hang on, I agreed the video could be used by news clients in 2012. I didn’t agree for it to be used in a documentary’.

“If you look at young people, for instance, they use Twitter as a text-messaging service so they would not think that anybody was looking (at what they are writing) whatsoever… 

“Those kind of ethical questions, we haven’t really worked out yet,” Wardle says. “We trying to think about them at Storyful because we’re also aware that we’re at the forefront of this and we need to be thinking about the ethical considerations because we know our news clients are kind of behind us.”

(Click here for a recent blog post by Wardle for more on the ethical issues.)

In a completely new and innovative approach to news gathering, Storyful describes itself as a “social media field producer”. What they do is watch social networks like hawks – either through technology they’ve developed or with their 33 staff members – for early warning for clients on breaking stories around the globe. Or when something goes viral such as a YouTube video, for instance, Storyful will do verification checks to see if it’s a hoax or not – if not and the video is newsworthy, it will put their clients in contact with the source. 

Storyful also “curates” Twitter lists of trusted journalists and other credible sources such as NGOs on events or countries where there are big stories on the go  (for example, this list on Syria) and then supplies its clients with the tweets, YouTube videos or Facebook updates, etc., to use in stories. 

If you’re not sure what “curate” means in this sense, Wardle explains: “The idea of curation is hand-picking and checking that all the people on a (Twitter) list are the people we want on that list. Many are journalists or people on the ground that we trust and we’ve been in contact with them so we know who they are. Curation is not automated.”

Storyful also  identifies new, credible sources close to stories – such as freelance journalists or activists – and connects them with their clients but the crucial thing that Storyful does is that it spend a lot of time verifying content so that the clients are getting the real deal.

“There’s a mix of different forensic tests that we do,” says Wardle, “from looking at someone’s user name and all of their other user names across other social platforms to see what they’ve posted before. We’ll also often pick up the phone and talk to them. We’ll look at weather records. We’ll look at the shadows and we’ll check the time of day. We’ll use Google satellite imagery to double-check where people are saying they are standing.” 

(Click here for more about verification techniques in a blog post by Storyful news editor Malachy Browne.)

Wardle says the amount of digital content being uploaded today is mind blowing – at the moment there’s 72 hours of YouTube footage being uploaded every minute – so Storyful is having to refine its technologies to find the newsworthy stuff.

Storyful is also spending much more time debunking for their clients than ever before. For example, recent tweets about a political assassination that could have had an effect on oil prices turned out to be completely untrue. 

“Because there’s more and more content uploaded, the speed at which a rumour can circulate is just amazing,” says Wardle. “Twitter is incredible but it doesn’t have a way of shutting those rumours down so that’s a challenge for news organisations.”

If it sounds like the technology is smarter than the people – and journalists are a dying breed in this bewildering new world – then Wardle debunks this too. 

Of the 33 staff members at Storyful,  25 people are fulltime journalists. 

“We pride ourselves on that, actually,” she says. “Yes, we’re a technology company and we use technology a great deal. We use it to help alert us and discover content but then it gets passed on to the hands of trained journalists, who have backgrounds in print or online or television, who then do the checks that any traditional journalist would do.”

For more:

Storyful’s blog

‘Former journos find new role in social media management’, Journalism.co.za, May 2012

‘Making sense of Twitter, editors and endorsements’, Journalism.co.za, July 2011

‘Malema-mayhem coverage belongs to Twitter’, Bizcommunity,  August 2011

‘Fast forward into the golden - digital - age of journalism’,Bizcommunity,  July 2011

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