By Aric Toler, BellingcatOne of the most common issues for researchers and journalists is verifying user-generated video content, most often found on social networks and file sharing platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. There is no silver bullet to verify every video, and it may be nearly impossible to verify some videos short of acquiring the original file from the source. However, there is a range of…
By Nathan Yau, FlowingData By Nathan Yau, FlowingData It used to be that we’d see a poorly made graph or a data design goof, laugh it up a bit, and then carry on. At some point though — during this past year especially — it grew more difficult to distinguish a visualization snafu from bias and deliberate misinformation. Of course, lying with statistics has been a thing for a long…
Over the last decade newsrooms have spent a lot of time building their digital toolbox. But today we need a new toolbox for building trust By Josh Stearns, Verification Junkie, for FirstDraftNews Earlier this year Gallup reported that trust in media, already at dismal levels, reached an all-time low. This erosion in trust has real implications for journalism’s role in democracy, its sustainability and its ability to be an anchor…
Amnesty International launches a new site to help journalists verify YouTube videos You can hear gunshots in the background of this shaky amateur YouTube video. There’s black smoke rising out of what looks to be a mosque; the narrator speaks in Arabic; the video’s description says the video was shot in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria. The video is compelling, but is it real? If it’s real, does this video…
Do you find newsworthy videos are often deleted before you get a chance to verify them and use them in your reporting? Video Vault might be your new best friend, Alastair Reid wrote for First Draft What is Video Vault? A tool to help archive videos online, with extra facilities for verification and collaboration. Do I have to pay for it? No, once your email address has been approved to use…
This article is part of a larger guidebook by RuNet Echo to help people learn how to conduct open-source research on the Russian Internet. Explore the complete guidebook at the special project page. RuNet Echo has now published eight installments in a guidebook on conducting open-source research on the Russian Internet. This ninth and final entry takes the tools and instructions we’ve been studying and applies them to a single case study: the…
This article is part of a larger guidebook by RuNet Echo to help people learn how to conduct open-source research on the Russian Internet. Explore the complete guidebook at the special project page. There are numerous free and open information portals and databases available for researching individuals in Ukraine and Russia, whether you are investigating a public figure or a private individual. Information about ordinary Russians and Ukrainians can be hard…
This article is part of a larger guidebook by RuNet Echo to help people learn how to conduct open-source research on the Russian Internet. Explore the complete guidebook at the special project page. Conducting open-source research can be difficult, and it’s even more challenging when you cannot read or write in the language of your research topic. Thanks to the Internet, however, even these obstacles don’t make it impossible for people…
As journalists we are used to saving information. We securely store documents, keep meticulous notes, save and back up important emails on our computers. But what about the information we find online during the course of our investigations? There are a few important issues to bear in mind and a few techniques you might want to consider. But, firstly, why is any of this important? Information Changes Content gets removed. Websites…
Our previous article about Facebook searches discussed how to use the Graph Search tool and what useful information can be retrieved with its help. But when working with Graph Search, some problems may appear: for example, at times it does not process search requests or does not recognize Cyrillic script. Graph Search became reliable at the end of December, 2014, when Facebook dropped its partnership with Bing. The search algorithm…
