Practical Tactics to fight misinformation for Journalists on Twitter

Fake news often trumps the truth because it’s messengers have mastered the art of having the loudest voice. This however doesn’t imply that’s it’s impossible to spot fake news. It’s important to identify checks and balances for any incoming news items to ensure that it’s sources and supporting sources are credible, the information is correctly dated and is void of any biases. In this new age of digital journalism, fact-checking is not something you sometimes do; it’s part of your-day-to-day workflow as a journalist.

And here’s a few tips, tricks and tactics to ensure a frictionless integration of fact-checking to your workflow:

Verifying Twitter Information

Twitter’s advanced search provides access to search filtering tools as below:

The Twitter search API offers three tiers of search APIs. The Standard search API searches against a sampling of recent Tweets published in the past 7 days, the Premium search API offers both free and paid access to the last 30 days of Tweets while the Enterprise search API provides Paid (and managed) access to either the last 30 days of Tweets, or access to the entire Tweet archive. The Twitter search documentation, enables you to refine twitter search queries.

Foller.me allows you to take a close look at a Twitter account. It provides a general overview of a profiles information and statistics. Spam accounts and robots tend to get suspended after a couple of weeks, identifying the account’s join date is key in building a credibility score for the profile in question. You can also access topic hashtags and mentions data as profiles interacting with a particular account, tweet sentiment and engagement analysis as well as a bar chart showing the activity time based on the latest tweets. This will help you identify any irregularities in tweeting habits.

4. Speak directly to the source

Try and speak directly to the source of a particular news item, ask for their off-Twitter contact details where you can speak in private, know if they were first hand witnesses, if they know other witnesses and whether or not they have supporting evidence, in terms of pictures or video. Where video or images are present, be sure to look out for distinctive features such as what people are wearing, vehicle number plates, any distinctive landmarks that can help you confirm the story. You can also cross-check landmarks against Google Earth and cross reference this with a tweet’s geo-location.

It is also important to audit the authenticity of a tweet. Look out for poor grammar, typos which will in most time be an indication of a real person being behind the tweets. It also helps to identify other people tweeting or reporting the same story and crowdsource for supporting information from them.

The Jeffrey’s Image Metadata Viewer, enables you to identify details under which a photo was taken. Modern digital cameras encode a lot of such data such as shutter speed, lens focal length, into the image file, generally called “Exif Data” which stands for “Exchangeable Image File Format”.

TwXplorer will enable you to find the hash tags being used for a breaking story since for any search terms you enter into twXplorer, you get four different ways to see your search results:

The provided tools allow you to quickly get contextual information on videos, to perform reverse image search on Google, Baidu or Yandex search engines, to fragment videos from various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Daily Motion) into keyframes, to enhance and explore keyframes and images through a magnifying lens, to query Twitter more efficiently through time intervals and many other filters, to read video and image metadata, and to apply forensic filters on still images.

Don’t be caught in the rush to break the news first, integrating these easy to use tools in your work-cycle will ensure that you’re output is both credible as well as contribute towards fighting misinformation online.

Stay tuned for the next instalment in this series on how to identify and verify information, images and video found on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.

Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.

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