Want to Help Fact-Check Breaking News? Here’s How and Where You Can Do It
By now, anyone who spends much time on social media has gotten pretty used to the deluge of information that occurs whenever there is a breaking-news event like the destruction of Malaysian flight MH17. Photos, videos and news reports about the details all go flying past in our streams, many of them from reliable sources — and yet a staggering proportion of them are wrong, either accidentally or in some cases deliberately. Photos are doctored, quotes manufactured and numbers invented.
One of the most crucial journalistic skills is sorting out what’s true and what’s not in such situations, and while many professional journalists may not like it, thanks to the internet anyone can do this job if they have the inclination, the tools and the time. No one illustrates that better than British blogger Brown Moses, also known as Eliot Higgins, who has gone from being an unemployed office worker to a crucial source of real-time, fact-checked information about the war in Syria.
Higgins didn’t get to where he is now because he is some kind of superhuman genius, he just applied himself to learning as much as possible about the conflict he was trying to understand, and then used a variety of tools and skills to relentlessly check and re-check the information that was coming in via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. So what if you want to join in this process and help verify some of the information that is flying by — what can you do? Here are some tools, services and news communities that can help: