We live in an era of digital revolution that started out as the dotcom bubble in the 1990's and has since encompassed various aspects of our lives. Our primary sources for procuring news include news websites, Twitter, Facebook and a whole array of social media platforms. But, with this comes the risk of misinformation perpetrated by social media platforms that can wreak havoc. Remember the August 2013 riots in Azad Maidan, Mumbai and the pictures circulated on social media platforms?
The European Journalism Council (EJC) has come out with a Verification Handbook that aims to guide users and journalists alike to verify information on social media and debunk falsified information before incorporating facts into stories. Meedan, a non-profit social technology company which aims to increase cross-language interaction on the web, with particular emphasis on translation and aggregation services in Arabic and English has developed Checkdesk — a platform that can help journalists and readers work together to check, verify and debunk digital media. Checkdesk has also been included in EJC's handbook and has won multi-year funding to support online journalism in the Arab world.
Tom Trewinnard, Business Development Manager from Meedan Labs which was instrumental in creating Checkdesk, spoke to dna about the platform, perils of online journalism and the need to verify information seeping in through social media.
Excerpts from the interview:
Can you tell us more about Checkdesk? What was the main objective behind its creation?
Checkdesk is an online platform to help journalists and readers work together to check, verify and debunk digital media.
In India, just as in the US, Europe and the Middle East, the digital media age has transformed journalism. One of the new risks emerging is the rapid spread of misinformation online: think about all the rumours that have emerged during the conflict in Syria, or during the attacks in Mumbai in 2008. Checkdesk aims to give journalists the tools they need to counteract some of this misinformation and present credible and transparent information to their readers.
A really important part of Checkdesk has also been the training workshops we've carried out across the Middle East over the past couple of years. We've worked with our amazing network of partners to create some really great resources and offer training in important digital media skills.
How can journalists use Checkdesk for developing stories?
Journalists can use Checkdesk to keep track of all the social media (or "user generated content") emerging about a particular story, and quickly incorporate that into their reporting . As the content comes into Checkdesk - either from a journalist or a reader - newsrooms can start fact checking the media, asking questions and adding context. As journalists investigate a tweet or a YouTube video, they can assign it a status: "Verified", "False", "In Progress", or "Undetermined". These statuses are a clear indication to the reader of whether the video or tweet can be trusted.
In this kind of work, it's as important to debunk fake news circulating as it is to verify authentic content that can add value to a story.
What sort of funding went into creating the application?
One of the great things about Checkdesk is that it's open source: newsrooms, bloggers and transparency advocates can grab the code from GitHub and run it on their own servers. We've been fortunate to work with some great donors that have been very keen to support projects that help strengthen journalism and support transparency. In 2011, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) gave us initial funding to develop Checkdesk, along with a training program implemented across the Middle East, and we have also received funding from the UK government's Arab Partnerships Participation Fund (APPF). In addition to support from Sida and APPF we won the 2012 International Press Institute News Innovation Award, and were recently named among the winners of the Knight News Challenge.
What kind of target audience are you looking at?
As the designers and developers of the Checkdesk toolkit, we're aiming to make a platform that is useful for journalists, journalism students, bloggers — anyone who is interested in making sure that credible user-generated content can shine a new light on stories and that misinformation doesn't control the media narrative.
Each of our publishing partners has a different audience: Yomaty is an Arabic-language instance of Checkdesk that aims to reach people in Egypt living in cities outside of Cairo; Bellingcat is a new English-language independent media group publishing on a range of topics from Syria to Ukraine - their investigation work is often picked up by international media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times and Deutsche Welle.
What are the target markets you are looking at?
We hope Checkdesk can be useful for journalists anywhere around the world. To date, we have mainly worked with publishing partners in the Middle East, as that's been something of an organisational focus for Meedan's work over the past 10 years. The platform is fully localised in Arabic, and most of our partners publish in Arabic.
That said, I think audiences and consumers of news media around the world share an important priority: they want accurate and timely reporting on the stories they care about. Checkdesk can help newsrooms meet that need, and we'd love to work with people anywhere in the world where this could be useful.
You have contributed to the European Journalism Council (Verification Handbook) as well. What is your advice to journalists using Checkdesk?
My advice would definitely be to read the Handbook! It's a really great resource - the first of its kind that deals with verification in this way, and we're looking to incorporate some of the best practices it lists into the ongoing work we're doing to refine and improve Checkdesk. My other recommendation is to use the expertise of your readers - getting readers more involved and engaged with the news reporting process benefits everyone. A community of engaged and knowledgeable readers can be a huge resource for a journalist, just look at the success of Andy Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter).
Watch the video below:
Can the authenticity of videos and images also be verified with CheckDesk?
Yes! We designed Checkdesk to be a place where journalists can work with their communities and investigate videos and images to say "Yes, we have verified this video" or "No, we know this video is a fake". Our approach to doing this right now isn't through algorithms or automation, but rather through creating a space where journalists can add context, ask questions, and assign a status to a video or image. A great example of this is Bellingcat's post on how they used Checkdesk to verify images of debris from the recent MH-17 incident in the Ukraine.
What is the future offing from your team at Meedan?
We're always working to refine and improve Checkdesk, both in terms of features, and to experiment with how it can be useful in different contexts. Last year, we ran a really great pilot with a journalism school in Beirut (Lebanese American University) with Checkdesk being used as a teaching tool for journalism students - we're keen to trial more such initiatives. We're also using support form the Knight Prototype Fund to research what new features could help make the verification process more streamlined and efficient for journalists.
To stay up to date on their progress, check out the Meedan blog and follow @Checkdesk on Twitter.
Link to the app: Checkdesk
Send in your feedback to vishalmanve.dna@gmail.com or tweet @vishalmanve12
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