Five Rules Verifying Information from Social Media

1. The importance of reportorial diligence

Source: wikimedia

I’m sure that many journalists who work for various news organizations have misreported a story or two in their careers. Although sometimes it is not enough to prevent a news organization from misreporting stories, it never hurts to have diligence when writing a story. Especially in a digital era such as today, technology has made it possible to expand a reporter’s power to verify stories via email, mobile phone calls, text, chat, database searchers and more.

2. Get a second opinion

Jack Shafer of Reuters says, “Near-perfect news could be printed and broadcast if reports were vetted and peer-reviewed for weeks or months before publication.” You probably don’t need to ask your peers to review it for weeks or months, but review to make sure they have pretty much the same information as you do. If you’re lucky, maybe they know more about the situation than you do and are willing to share the information to improve your article.

3. Rely on law enforcement sources

Breaking news has always been a difficult thing to report accurately, and one the downside of social media is that we don’t always know who are telling the truth and who are exaggerating or downplaying the situation. Like Mark Little, CEO and founder of Storyful, says, “We are in a business model where we are no longer the owner of scarce information, we are the managers of over abundance of information and data and content.” To avoid any mistakes, it is usually better to wait for a government press conference and official announcements to verify the information that we have on hand.

4. Don’t be afraid to acknowledge your mistakes

When it comes to breaking news, it’s hard to follow the steps listed above because time sensitivity comes into play. Shafer says that readers “willingly accept a certain level of error as long as the news organizations readily acknowledge their mistakes.” When you have more time to publish a longer story, be sure to admit and correct the mistakes you make in an earlier post. This is easier to do when you publish your story online because surely you can go back and edit your story in a matter of seconds.

5. It’s a numbers game

It is always better to confirm any information with more than just one source. If there is one thing I learned from Storyful’s case studies, it’s that the more people you talk to about the story, the more you’ll know. You can never know if “two reporters’ sources each had truly independent information or if one was simply parroting what the other had told him,” to quote Bill Grueskin Columbia Journalism Review about Doug Danziger story. False information is still false no matter how much retweets it gets. But if you can find at least five users who tweeted similar things at around the same time, then it’s probably true.