I recently gave testimony at the Miami meeting of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy. Here are my speaking notes. I published this piece on Medium originally here.

I have read some of the other testimony before the Commission and was pleased to see people speak about media literacy, the alarming ease with which technology will enable us to create compelling audio and video fakes, so-called “information disorder” brought on by massive changes in communications technology, and the shift in trust from institutions to “people like me.” These are important topics.

I’m here to talk about Native American content on Facebook.

Yes, really.

I believe this case study encompasses many of the challenging and urgent issues related to trust, misinformation, and digital communities that this commission is grappling with.

There is a massive network of Native American pages, groups, and user accounts on Facebook that collectively have millions of fans, members, and friends. They publish articles about native issues, and share photos and videos of events such as the protests at Standing Rock. There are also pages that exclusively publish photos of attractive Native American women and beg fans to comment on their beauty. Some of the pages and related websites publish articles about unrelated health topics such a fibromyalgia. Their articles about actual Native American issues are often plagiarized from genuine Native publishers based in the United States.

Some theses sites and pages — which by the way are some of the biggest and most active Native American pages on all of Facebook — also publish completely false stories or trade in classic clickbait articles. One group of pages recently shared a fabricated story about a police officer arresting Malia Obama and later being found dead. It was plagiarized from a fake news site.

If you’re a person with an interest in Native American topics and issues, these pages and groups will present as some of the best places to get that content on Facebook. They have signals of authority such as a high number of fans, and a name that seems legitimate. Often the groups or pages are administered by profiles that profess to be Native American. The pages often falsely list an address or organization in US that they are affiliated with. In some cases, the people who run these groups use a checkmark emoji in the group name to make it seem as if the group has been verified by Facebook.

So, who is running these groups and pages?

Young men in places such as Kosovo and Vietnam.

I wrote about this back in late 2016 when the Standing Rock issue sparked interest in Native American pages and groups, and when these page operators were doing a booming business selling t-shirts with design stolen from real Native American artists. I covered it again earlier last year when I wrote about the trend of overseas information, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Media Matters also covered this issue recently and as a result many pages were taken down. Many more remain.

I must also mention a woman in Indiana named Sarah Thompson who, when not raising her kids and working her farm, spends time collecting examples of these fake Native American pages, profiles, and groups in the hope of raising the alarm about them.

I spoke to her last week and she made an important point: there are real communities of Native Americans on Facebook. But for many people on the platform, Native American culture means glamour shots of women in headdresses, clickbait content about unrelated topics, and fake news about Malia Obama. This sea of fake Native Americans is drowning out the real voices. They are taking up space, attention, and revenue from actual Native Americans.

This is happening because of a combination of factors that play out time and again in a variety of niches and topics, and not just on Facebook. These fake Native publishers are winning because they are better at playing the game. Authenticity and accuracy do not determine success. At times, they hamper it. Attention often flows to those who best know how to exploit the systems that capture it.

For me this example encompasses so much about the current reality of media and online misinformation. For one thing, it shows that online misinformation is about more than just information itself — it also involves economic and algorithmic incentives on a global scale. We also need to think about human factors, such as cognition and belief.

It’s a complex problem, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have the answers to it for you today. I do however, have a list of things I think about as I do my daily work of detecting and revealing digital deception and misinformation in their many forms. I offer them to you in case you want to fold them into your work.

• Our human faculties for sense making, and evaluating and validating information, are being challenged and in some ways destroyed in this new information ecosystem. We are all getting false signals. This affects our ability to construct and apply trust.
• It also creates an opportunity for bad actors who understand how to exploit this ecosystem. Whether it’s overseas spammers focused on Native American content or a well-funded Russian effort to mine the divisions in American society, in both cases they are exploiting openness, free speech, and the new media reality that is on the one hand more democratized than ever before — while simultaneously dominated by powerful platforms and mediated by algorithms.
• The result is that our current media environment is easier to exploit than ever before in history.
• One thing we must keep in mind is the technology and systems that enabled this reality are optimized to capture and surveil the activities of users. They therefore have the potential to become the world’s greatest censorship infrastructure. So we must be careful that attempts to root out misinformation do not have the unintended consequence of cracking down on free speech.
• Just as many of us are now used to seeing a label on our clothing that lists somewhere far away, the same is happening to information. This is the age of overseas information. The flattening effects of platforms — whereby content and actors largely look the same in a timeline or News Feed — has enabled this on a massive scale. Think about how globalization has impacted manufacturing and other industries. Now let’s think about his this will apply to information.
• The cues that people have used to determine the authenticity of information are in many cases no longer sufficient. Just about everything can be fabricated. We must keep this is mind as we look to establish new signals of trust, because they too will inevitably be fabricated and gamed.
• A class of these new signals must therefore be unimpeachable and difficult to fabricate. This in general could mean metadata, chains of custody, and perhaps open, blockchain-like ledgers that track the flow of information. I’m not an expert in this areas but suffice it to say we need to create incentives for experts to work on this.
• Technology is not the only answer. We have a human problem on our hands. Our cognitive abilities are in some ways overmatched by what we have created. We must develop our capacity to navigate this complex and confusing information ecosystem. For now, a new orientation is to assume fakeness, assume deception. An old mantra was “trust, but verify.” But now I think this default assumption of trust is in some ways under attack, or perhaps self-defeating. I also think we see it receding with the ongoing decline in trust in institutions. And so perhaps we are entering an era of “verify, then trust.”
• This raises serious questions about how we evolve society and democracy in a world where the assumption of trust can be exploited, and where it is no longer the default. What does “verify, then trust” do to our social fabric? I hope it’s something you will marshall your resources and brainpower to consider and, hopefully, point a way forward.

And I also hope that when you come across Native American content on Facebook or elsewhere you will pause and consider whether it is what it appears to be. Verify, then trust.

Thank you

“Verify, then trust”: testimony before the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy was originally published in Trust, Media and Democracy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have read some of the other testimony before the Commission and was pleased to see people speak about media literacy, the alarming ease with which technology will enable us to create compelling audio and video fakes, so-called “information disorder” brought on by massive changes in communications technology, and the shift in trust from institutions to “people like me.” These are important topics.

I’m here to talk about Native American content on Facebook.

Yes, really.

I believe this case study encompasses many of the challenging and urgent issues related to trust, misinformation, and digital communities that this commission is grappling with.

There is a massive network of Native American pages, groups, and user accounts on Facebook that collectively have millions of fans, members, and friends. They publish articles about native issues, and share photos and videos of events such as the protests at Standing Rock. There are also pages that exclusively publish photos of attractive Native American women and beg fans to comment on their beauty. Some of the pages and related websites publish articles about unrelated health topics such a fibromyalgia. Their articles about actual Native American issues are often plagiarized from genuine Native publishers based in the United States.

Some theses sites and pages — which by the way are some of the biggest and most active Native American pages on all of Facebook — also publish completely false stories or trade in classic clickbait articles. One group of pages recently shared a fabricated story about a police officer arresting Malia Obama and later being found dead. It was plagiarized from a fake news site.

If you’re a person with an interest in Native American topics and issues, these pages and groups will present as some of the best places to get that content on Facebook. They have signals of authority such as a high number of fans, and a name that seems legitimate. Often the groups or pages are administered by profiles that profess to be Native American. The pages often falsely list an address or organization in US that they are affiliated with. In some cases, the people who run these groups use a checkmark emoji in the group name to make it seem as if the group has been verified by Facebook.

So, who is running these groups and pages?

Young men in places such as Kosovo and Vietnam.

I wrote about this back in late 2016 when the Standing Rock issue sparked interest in Native American pages and groups, and when these page operators were doing a booming business selling t-shirts with design stolen from real Native American artists. I covered it again earlier last year when I wrote about the trend of overseas information, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Media Matters also covered this issue recently and as a result many pages were taken down. Many more remain.

I must also mention a woman in Indiana named Sarah Thompson who, when not raising her kids and working her farm, spends time collecting examples of these fake Native American pages, profiles, and groups in the hope of raising the alarm about them.

I spoke to her last week and she made an important point: there are real communities of Native Americans on Facebook. But for many people on the platform, Native American culture means glamour shots of women in headdresses, clickbait content about unrelated topics, and fake news about Malia Obama. This sea of fake Native Americans is drowning out the real voices. They are taking up space, attention, and revenue from actual Native Americans.

This is happening because of a combination of factors that play out time and again in a variety of niches and topics, and not just on Facebook. These fake Native publishers are winning because they are better at playing the game. Authenticity and accuracy do not determine success. At times, they hamper it. Attention often flows to those who best know how to exploit the systems that capture it.

For me this example encompasses so much about the current reality of media and online misinformation. For one thing, it shows that online misinformation is about more than just information itself — it also involves economic and algorithmic incentives on a global scale. We also need to think about human factors, such as cognition and belief.

It’s a complex problem, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have the answers to it for you today. I do however, have a list of things I think about as I do my daily work of detecting and revealing digital deception and misinformation in their many forms. I offer them to you in case you want to fold them into your work.

• Our human faculties for sense making, and evaluating and validating information, are being challenged and in some ways destroyed in this new information ecosystem. We are all getting false signals. This affects our ability to construct and apply trust.
• It also creates an opportunity for bad actors who understand how to exploit this ecosystem. Whether it’s overseas spammers focused on Native American content or a well-funded Russian effort to mine the divisions in American society, in both cases they are exploiting openness, free speech, and the new media reality that is on the one hand more democratized than ever before — while simultaneously dominated by powerful platforms and mediated by algorithms.
• The result is that our current media environment is easier to exploit than ever before in history.
• One thing we must keep in mind is the technology and systems that enabled this reality are optimized to capture and surveil the activities of users. They therefore have the potential to become the world’s greatest censorship infrastructure. So we must be careful that attempts to root out misinformation do not have the unintended consequence of cracking down on free speech.
• Just as many of us are now used to seeing a label on our clothing that lists somewhere far away, the same is happening to information. This is the age of overseas information. The flattening effects of platforms — whereby content and actors largely look the same in a timeline or News Feed — has enabled this on a massive scale. Think about how globalization has impacted manufacturing and other industries. Now let’s think about his this will apply to information.
• The cues that people have used to determine the authenticity of information are in many cases no longer sufficient. Just about everything can be fabricated. We must keep this is mind as we look to establish new signals of trust, because they too will inevitably be fabricated and gamed.
• A class of these new signals must therefore be unimpeachable and difficult to fabricate. This in general could mean metadata, chains of custody, and perhaps open, blockchain-like ledgers that track the flow of information. I’m not an expert in this areas but suffice it to say we need to create incentives for experts to work on this.
• Technology is not the only answer. We have a human problem on our hands. Our cognitive abilities are in some ways overmatched by what we have created. We must develop our capacity to navigate this complex and confusing information ecosystem. For now, a new orientation is to assume fakeness, assume deception. An old mantra was “trust, but verify.” But now I think this default assumption of trust is in some ways under attack, or perhaps self-defeating. I also think we see it receding with the ongoing decline in trust in institutions. And so perhaps we are entering an era of “verify, then trust.”
• This raises serious questions about how we evolve society and democracy in a world where the assumption of trust can be exploited, and where it is no longer the default. What does “verify, then trust” do to our social fabric? I hope it’s something you will marshall your resources and brainpower to consider and, hopefully, point a way forward.

And I also hope that when you come across Native American content on Facebook or elsewhere you will pause and consider whether it is what it appears to be. Verify, then trust.

Thank you.

Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com

At the start of the CNBC Republican debate Wednesday night, PolitiFact put out a call to its followers to help identify checkable statements:

PolitiFact on Twitter

If you hear something you'd like fact-checked, tweet at us with #PolitiFactThis #CNBCGOPDebate

At the same time the team of PolitiFact checkers were watching the debate and listening intently for claims, an automated system was scanning the live debate transcript and tweeting out checkable statements like these:

ClaimBuster on Twitter

CNBCGOPDebate in 2008, barack obama missed 60 or 70% of his votes and the same newspaper endorsed him again.

ClaimBuster on Twitter

CNBCGOPDebate they built the great wall of china, that is 13,000 miles.

Those are statements made by debate participants that contain a factual claim. You could have easily handed them to a fact checker and asked them to see if they’re true or not.

ClaimBuster is the system powering that Twitter account. It was developed at the University of Texas-Arlington by Ph.D. student Naeemul Hassan, in collaboration with partners including Bill Adair, the c0-founder of PolitiFact who now runs the Duke Reporters’ Lab.

ClaimBuster quickly analyzes a selection of text and identifies what Hassan calls “Check-worthy Factual Sentences.” These sentences “contain factual claims and the general public will be interested in knowing whether the claims are true,” according to a research paper about ClaimBuster published by Hassan, Adair and five co-authors.

The system also assigns the sentences a score based on their “check-worthiness”. Here’s what that looked like during the September GOP debate (the darker the color, the more (check-worthy):

The authors write that ClaimBuster represents one piece of what could eventually be a fully automated fact-checking system. They call this the “Holy Grail” of fact-checking, while also acknowledging that an automated system is a complex an far-off goal.

“A fully automated fact-checker calls for fundamental breakthroughs in multiple fronts and, eventually, it represents a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI),” they write in the paper.

Along with being able to automatically identify checkable claims in real-time, the “Holy Grail” system would need to be able to compare the claims to a database of accurate and up-to-date checked facts that is comprehensive enough to check a wide range of claims. In a perfect scenario, the claim and the corresponding checked fact would be compared and the system would render an accurate verdict within a few seconds of the statement being made.

We may never get there. But ClaimBuster on its own could prove useful for verification and debunking.

The authors note that “human fact-checkers frequently have difficulty keeping up with the rapid spread of misinformation. Technology, social media and new forms of journalism have made it easier than ever to disseminate falsehoods and half-truths faster than the fact-checkers can expose them.”

The ability to rapidly identify new claims gaining velocity on social media could help journalists and others track, verify and, when necessary, debunk rumors in their early stages.

Identifying emerging claims

When using Emergent to track and debunk online rumors, one of the biggest challenges I faced was identifying new rumors early in their existence. It’s hard to keep up with the spread of misinformation. It’s really hard to identify rumors and soon-to-be-viral claims when they are in their infancy.

So I can imagine, for example, pointing ClaimBuster at a hashtag for a hurricane and watching as it extracts tweets that contain claims about the storm. That could be a powerful way to track new rumors. Layer in the ability to sort the claims by keyword (“flood,” “dead,” “riot” etc.) and by the number of retweets and/or impressions over a timeframe and you have a rumor detection tool.

But as with the Holy Grail of an automated fact checking system, there are significant hurdles to getting us there. One of them is a familiar question of whether there is a big enough market for the ClaimBuster team to continue to pursue fact checking (or verification) as their product strategy.

The market For claim identification

As of today, ClaimBuster is a research project. Hassan and colleagues are spending the next seven weeks talking to newsrooms and others to see if and how it could be commercialized, and what the best market could be.

“We’re trying to find a customer segment where they have the need [for the product],” Hassan told me this week.

My honest feedback for him was that journalists and newsrooms are probably not that customer segment.

Even though fact checking is growing, it’s still not present in most newsrooms. Would a newsroom leader pay for a tool to pull out claims for them to check? My feeling is no. All that does it give them a list of claims that they have to find a journalist to check. It’s still very labor intensive — and there needs to be a strong argument as to why an editor would assign someone to go check claims as opposed to doing something else.

Would newsrooms pay for a tool that could analyze social media and identify new and possibly soon-to-be-viral claims? As a standalone product, I don’t see newsrooms paying for that. It strikes me as more of a feature within a product such as NewsWhip’s Spike, which is already helping newsrooms and others identify trending content.

The real opportunity, as is often the case, is to move away from thinking about newsrooms as customers and instead focus on brands. The social media team at McDonald’s might like to know that a claim about, say, where they source their beef is picking up traction online.

If you also used ClaimBuster to scan a database such as Nexis for new claims appearing in news articles, you could also have a powerful claim/rumor tracker for brands. PR firms would love to be able to see all the claims being made about their clients.

The same is true for political operations: tell them which claims about their candidate are out there, and show which ones are gaining traction. Or let them track the same information about an opponent. (The end result, of course, might be that candidate X would tempt to amplify and pour gasoline on an emerging false rumor about Candidate Y, even if it’s not true.)

This is a familiar scenario in that there are often products and new technologies that could help journalists, but newsrooms can be tough or unworkable as a primary market. The exception is if you have a product that can demonstrably help the organization earn revenue, grow traffic or cut costs. I don’t think fact-checking has a clear case in any of those areas right now.

But if a corporate market can be found and developed, newsrooms can become an attractive secondary sale. This is already the case for products such as Dataminr.

The point is that the best path for developing and commercializing fact checking technology is likely to first ensure it can be applied outside of the newsroom.

Our “Holy Grail” is only going to be found if other industries help fund the quest.

Craig Silverman is a member of the First Draft Coalition, editor of BuzzFeed Canada and founder of Emergent.info.

Follow First Draft on Twitter for the latest in social newsgathering and verification.

In search of fact checking’s ‘Holy Grail’: News outlets might not get there alone was originally published in First Draft Footnotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com

One of the best ways to enjoy an Eliot Higgins workshop about how he uses open source information to verify details about the shooting down of flight MH17, or other topics, is to turn your back on him and look at the audience.

Eliot will calmly yet speedily take people through a workflow that incorporates analyzing satellite images, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, military equipment databases, shoe size calculators — and on and on — to help answer a single question about, say, a specific munition.

As he breaks down his method, smiles begin to creep across faces in the audience. The smiles then shift to looks of astonishment as they process how this one person can use all of these tools and techniques to answer what may seem like a very difficult or obscure question.

Some might walk away thinking that verification always involves this kind of master-class level knowledge. Sometimes it does, but most of the time it begins with a series of simple, relatively quick checks that help a journalist probe and test a piece of information. What you find will then help you decide how much deeper you need to go.

In just 20 minutes you can do an initial four checks that can yield important information about a piece of digital content, be it a news story, image, video or something else.

1. Check the source

What’s the bio of the person who shared the content? What else do they tend to share? Have others shared the same content earlier? If you’re looking at an article or other kind of online document, look at the site it’s published on, and what it is attributed to. Then follow any links back to sources until you can find the place where it originated.

One truth of the online world is that so many things are aggregated, stripped, replaced, retweeted etc, that the first thing you need to do is figure out where that piece of information originated.

2. Reverse image search all images

Use TinEye or Google Reverse Image Search to see where else that image has appeared online. Old images are often re-shared in the wrong context. Photos of people are often repurposed in misleading ways. Check the images. This takes little time, especially if the image is new and therefore not all over the web.

3. Search names/handles across networks and sites

Take the name of the person and their account name and search for it across social networks and in Google. See if you can find other profiles. See if the site that published a piece of content has a reputation online and who is behind it. A good tool to help with this is Storyful Multisearch.

4. Search for similar content

Who else is reporting this or sharing? Can you find other credible sources? Do they have first hand information? Read other articles, search with relevant keywords on social networks and see if what you see aligns with the information you’re examining.

If you spend five minutes on each of the above, you’ll be able to get an initial sense of what key questions you have about the content, and what concerns require you to dig deeper.

Craig Silverman is a member of the First Draft Coalition, editor of BuzzFeed Canada and founder of Emergent.info.

Follow First Draft on Twitter for the latest in social newsgathering and verification.

The 4 bare-bones things every journalist needs to know about verification was originally published in First Draft Footnotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Craig Silverman, for First Draft

Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com

Online hoaxes often share the same characteristics and are created and deployed using the same tactics. If you spend enough time tracking and debunking hoaxes, your nose for sniffing them out gets more refined and you’re less likely to fall for them.

But not all of us can dedicate months or years to hunting and documenting hoaxes. So here are some of the things I’ve learned over the years.

1. Timelines don’t add up

People perpetrating a hoax often have to construct a backstory in order to build credibility. This may involve creating a history for a company, person, or other entity. The farther back they go to establish credibility, the more likely they are to make mistakes.

A really simple example of this is a hoax that claimed a research company had found proof that users of Internet Explorer had a lower IQ than those using other web browsers.

The company cited in the press release said it had been in business since 2006 but a quick Whois search on its domain name showed that it had only been registered weeks before. Their backstory fell apart with just a simple search. (Unfortunately, the story was written up far and wide before being debunked.)

2. Names and people are problematic

The names and people cited in hoaxes often have gaps in their history, and offer a very thin profile. This is because most of the time they simply don’t exist.

Take, for example, the lawyer who was cited as representing Jay Z and Beyonce in their quest to buy the rights to the Confederate flag. This hoax story relied on quotes from lawyer “Ralph Hammerstein.” Online searches for lawyers with that name come up empty, as would searches of licensing databases in the relevant states. There is no such lawyer, let alone one of the profile one would expect of someone who represents Jay Z and Beyonce.

Or think of Jude Finisterra. That was the name used by one of the Yes Men who pretended to be a spokesman fom Dow Chemical in the famous 2004 Bhopal hoax that fooled the BBC. An online search or call to Dow headquarters would have found that no one by that name worked for Dow. (The Yes Men also chose a name that had some significance built into it: Jude is the patron saint of the impossible and Finisterra means earth’s end. Sometimes hoaxsters also use names from literature.)

Finally, pay close attention to photos used as headshots or avatars for people. Hoaxsters often use photos from other events or from social media accounts to go with their fake characters. A reverse image search is a fast way to see if that really is a photo of the person they say.

3. It appeals to a specific group or ideology or it’s too perfect

Humans love to hear things that we already believe. It is immensely comforting for us to be told information that conforms to our existing beliefs and knowledge.

Hoaxes often appeal to preexisting beliefs in order to make people more likely to willingly accept and propagate them. North Dakota named a landfill after President Obama? Obama haters might love that idea so much that they won’t bother to read it more closely.

In a similar vein, stories that fall into the too-good-to-check category are so irresistibly perfect/ironic/amusing that people feel compelled to pass them on. Case in point: Jay Z and Beyonce buying the rights to the confederate flag. Or the viral hoax that claimed Abraham Lincoln had invented his own, low-tech version of Facebook back in his day. Both are too perfect.

4. It has the trappings (and only the trappings) of authenticity

A hoax has to find ways to convey a sense of credibility. Fake news articles often cite other media reports to back up their claims, but they will not link to these (non-existent) articles or they’ll simply inset links that go to the homepage of the website they mention. Their bet is that most people won’t take the step of actually clicking through.

Hoaxsters will also often invent the name of police officers or others in positions of authority, and inset quotes from them. The North Dakota landfill story, for example, quoted two state senators that do not exist.

5. It falls apart when you focus on the details

Click all of the links, Google all of the names, reverse image search all of the images, run a Whois on the domains mentioned. This is how you’ll find the loose thread that untangles the whole thing. Every piece of information offered is a detail to be examined. Something that reads as real will quickly fall apart in the face of a few clicks and searches.

That Lincoln Facebook hoax I mentioned? The newspaper article that was used as a primary source included a telltale sign of fakery that was highlighted by a commenter on a post I did about the hoax:

The “newspaper” article in question:

Craig Silverman is a member of First Draft, a coalition of experts sharing top tips and training in how to handle user generated news content. Follow First Draft here and on Twitter for more updates, advice guides and case studies.

5 Telltale Signs Of An Online Hoax was originally published in First Draft Footnotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently completed a fellowship with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism that saw me study how news organizations handle online rumors and unverified claims. I also examined best practices for debunking online misinformation.

This research is collected in a detailed report that you can download and read for free. It’s called “Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation.” You can view the data we collected (and continue to collect) by visiting Emergent, our real-time rumor tracker.

Below is a report excerpt that offers a look at current debunking efforts in journalism, and among the skeptic community. If you like what you see, you should sign up for our weekly rumor roundup email.

Find more reads and resources on newsgathering, verification and eyewitness media at FirstDraftNews.com

In the fall of 2013, a story circulated on Facebook about the murder of a Swedish dentist.

Marcia Karlsson, the dentist, was allegedly beaten to death by an ex-boyfriend. In a Facebook post that people in Sweden shared thousands of times, a woman named Madeleine told the story of the murder of Karlsson, whom she identified as her friend. Madeleine said the murder hadn’t received any press coverage because the media in the country didn’t want to write about a crime committed by an immigrant.

It was a story that outraged many people, and Madeleine’s post rocketed around Facebook in Sweden. Karlsson, the murdered dentist, had her own Facebook profile, and she was connected to real people. There were pictures of her and her two adopted children.

Jack Werner, the social media editor for Metro Sweden, saw Madeleine’s Facebook post and wanted to write about it. As he dug deeper into the facts of the case, the story began to fall apart. Court records came up empty. Marcia Karlsson, the beloved dentist, wasn’t listed in any directory. “I found out that the whole story was fake, that the dentist didn’t exist, and that it probably was just a big propaganda thing with a racist agenda,” Werner said.

He wrote about what he found, offering a thorough debunking of the hoax.136 The article could have been a one-off for Werner, but it ended up birthing a regular feature for him and two Metro Sweden colleagues, The Viral Reviewer (Viralgranskaren). Since March of 2013, the trio has worked together to investigate trending stories published by the Swedish press to see if the facts stand up to scrutiny.

“I started thinking about the many fake stories that probably circulated among the some five million Swedish Facebook users, stories that we as journalist[s] would never see because we aren’t friends with all of them,” he said. “I got the idea to do that kind of journalism in a more regular and systemized manner, which also would enable us to ask the readers for tips about what they’re seeing.”

Werner said the reaction from members of the public to the feature “is the best I’ve ever had. I get a feeling that people really wanted and needed this kind of service.” The feature has proven so popular and effective that the reporters were awarded the 2014 Innovator of the Year award at the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism.

The Viral Reviewer is one of several dedicated debunking efforts that have sprung up at news organizations since 2013. Caitlin Dewey of The Wash- ington Post writes a weekly post, “What was fake on the Internet this week.” It started not long after Gawker launched a similar weekly effort it dubbed “Antiviral.” Adrienne LaFrance originally wrote the column, but when she took a job at The Atlantic it became a dedicated blog. Another site in the Gawker media network is also doing consistent debunking work. Matt Novak writes a regular post about the veracity of viral photos on his Paleofuture blog, which is part of Gizmodo. He and others also contribute to Factually, a Gizmodo blog dedicated to debunking and fact-checking.

Some of these initiatives emerged after Charlie Warzel authored his post for BuzzFeed that predicted “2014 Is The Year Of The Viral Debunk.” Data collected for this paper suggests that the viral aspect of debunking hasn’t yet been realized, but there has definitely been an uptick in dedicated journalistic debunking efforts.

These new endeavors share some similarities with political fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. They are all committed to sorting fact from fiction. But while political fact-checkers focus their efforts on the public statements of politicians, political groups, and public figures, the newer debunking attempts home in on online misinformation and don’t restrict themselves to a particular vertical.

Interviews with journalists engaged in these efforts revealed that, like Werner, they feel this work is the core of what journalism is supposed to be. Still, some expressed feelings of futility or frustration that fakes and hoaxes are so prevalent, and beliefs that news organizations play a significant role in helping them spread.

Members of the skeptic community, some of whom I spoke to during my research, echoed the same sense of frustration. That community includes a diverse group of bloggers, scientific investigators, and others who seek to dispel hoaxes, myths, scams, and other forms of trickery. Their sites include the venerable snopes.com, as well as Hoax-Slayer.com, Doubtful News, and many more.

These skeptics and urban-legend busters also pointed to news organizations as being part of the rumor-mongering problem, as much as they are the solution. Brett Christensen has run Hoax-Slayer.com since 2003, and said he wished the press made more of an effort to debunk falsehoods. “I think it would be a very positive step if the bigger news outlets started to report more on hoaxes and scams,” he said. “Wider coverage might more effectively get through to the Internet public at large.”

Through phone interviews and an online questionnaire, these journalists and skeptic debunkers shared best practices and some cautionary advice about trying to combat online misinformation.

The Value of Journalistic Debunking

The debunking efforts in the press are in some ways an anti-viral viral con- tent strategy, a maneuver to insert themselves into trending content by examining and verifying viral stories. This brings traffic to debunkers, but it also helps spread the truth about a viral story.

One example of a debunking that delivered big traffic and helped provide valuable information came during Hurricane Sandy in 2013. Journalists at The Atlantic collaborated to confirm and debunk viral images that spread in the wake of the storm. Alexis Madrigal, who now works for Fusion, led the initiative. He saw a need because, he said, “So many fake Sandy photos were creeping up, and someone, somewhere, needed to try to sort that shit out.”

Madrigal said it was by far the most popular piece of content he’s ever worked on. Part of the reason for the post’s success was that it provided useful and relevant information at a time of high anxiety. In the language of rumor, it helped people make sense of the situation.

The other reason it was effective, according to Madrigal, is that he paid special attention to the visual aspects of the post. “In my Sandy post, I created a visual language for real and fake images that I think was really effective,” he said. The approach included embedding an indication of the photo’s veracity in the image itself. (It’s similar to other efforts such as PolitiFact’s Truth- o-Meter, which offers a visual verdict.) Here’s an example:

One benefit of approaches like this is that the images travel on social media with their veracity verdict intact. In this case, readers didn’t have to click through to see whether an image was real, fake, or undetermined.

Tom Phillips, who at the time was working for MSNBC UK, was another collaborator on The Atlantic’s post. He had launched a Tumblr, “Is Twitter Wrong?,” that was doing similar debunking work during the storm. Phillips agreed to help The Atlantic. “Part of the reason I did it in the first place was as an experiment to see if it was possible [to debunk in real time],” Phillips said in a previous interview with me. “You know, would that fit into sort of a daily workflow in a newsroom, in that kind of context, or would it just become a massive, massive time suck? And the answer from that was basically yeah, you can do it. You can do an awful lot of it in a way that actually fits in with a daily workflow pretty well.”

Phillips said he subsequently saw more journalists engage in debunking during breaking news stories such as the Sandy Hook shootings and the Boston Bombings. “I saw an awful lot of journalists were actively going out doing debunking,” he said. “Debunking is now part of reporting, basically.”

Caitlin Dewey has written a weekly debunking post for The Washing- ton Post’s Intersect blog since March of 2014. She calls it “the most fun- damental service of all — correcting very basic misconceptions about the world and the news.” Though some viral hoaxes or items of misinformation can be amusing, Dewey said she often encounters “things that are being misconstrued in a way where there is a danger to public knowledge and public safety.”

She believes that her weekly debunking posts fulfill an important journalistic mission — and they get solid traffic. (She declined to share specific metrics.) “They do very well,” she said. “That wasn’t the case initially. I don’t know how long it took them to catch on, but now they consistently do quite well.” After having worked on the column for more than thirty consecutive weeks, Dewey has never had fewer than five items to debunk.

Adrienne LaFrance was also never short of material when she created the Antiviral column for Gawker at the end of 2013. Each week she focused on reporting out the details behind hoaxes rather than simply aggregating what had been debunked. “My goal is always to have reporting behind it because it’s very easy to Google the hoax and aggregate what people have already done,” LaFrance said in an interview before she stopped writing the column. “I’d much rather go deeper. One reason so much gets shared is people not taking time to put out a call or do the emailing back and forth with PR people — and we need to do that.”

Her comment that a debunking is often only a phone call or email away underlines Phillips’ point that this work can be done quickly and without a huge amount of effort. But many newsrooms don’t put the emphasis on asking questions before something is aggregated and pushed out.

Changing Minds?

Journalistic debunking efforts aren’t only focused on viral images and hoaxes. In Ukraine, StopFake.org operates in English and Ukrainian. It was launched in 2014 in response to the propaganda and misinformation that flowed around the conflict in that country.

A team of volunteers, including teachers and students from the Mohyla School of Journalism, track false claims from Russian officials and their sup- porters. They debunk them in articles and videos. “In our case the most successful thing for us was that no one from the Russian side was expecting us to start debunking things,” said Margo Gontar, a co-founder of the site who works as an anchor for a Ukranian media outlet. “In the beginning there were bold lies which were actuality really easy to debunk.”

Gontar said they initially received upward of 150 emails a day from people suggesting things for them to look into. After just three months of operation the site was attracting 1.5 million visitors a month, according to an article from the Nieman Journalism Lab. Gontar noted, however, that the Russian government’s RT cable channel, which often spreads content that StopFake debunks, has a vastly bigger budget and has announced plans to expand into other languages.

While they are up against a better-funded opposition, Gontar said one mark of StopFake’s success is that it caused the Russian government and its supporters “to change their strategy” and try to create more sophisticated misinformation. In terms of impact, she doesn’t know at what rate Ukrainians and others use the debunking work they do to help spread the truth. “I don’t have stats . . . but I did receive letters from readers who said, ‘You know, I managed to change someone’s mind thanks to your articles,’ ” she said.

But Gontar is also careful to note that their site likely has little or no effect on people whose minds are made up. “People who truly believe that Putin is the savior of the planet and that all Ukrainians are fascists — it’s kind of hard to tell something to them,” she said.

Other Debunkers

The skeptic movement has its roots in the work of a magician and escape artist. James Randi toured the world as the Amazing Randi, performing remarkable illusions. Randi wanted to entertain, not deceive. When he saw people (like Uri Geller) claim to have special psychokinetic abilities, he challenged them to reproduce their powers in a controlled environment. (Geller, among other things, would bend spoons using what he said was the power of his mind.)

In one famous incident, Randi worked with the staff of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson to ensure that Geller couldn’t pull any tricks when he appeared. Geller’s ensuing guest spot was a complete failure, and he lived it out in front of millions of viewers. Yet, rather than be exposed as a fraud, Geller’s devastated reaction earned him sympathy from the audience — and an instant booking on The Merv Griffin Show, among others, according to a profile of Randi in The New York Times Magazine. “To an enthusiastically trusting public, [Geller’s] failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time,” the Times reported.

The article included an explanation of why Randi prefers to call himself a scientific investigator, rather than a debunker:

Because if I were to start out saying, “This is not true, and I’m going to prove it’s not true,” that means I’ve made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, “I just don’t know what I’m going to find out.” That may end up — and usually it does end up — as a complete debunking. But I don’t set out to debunk it.

Randi has inspired many people to become scientific investigators. Tim Farley is a software developer by trade, but he also runs websites to help people learn how to judge the veracity of the information they see online. “I feel the best route is to encourage people to become their own fact-checkers and show them how the techniques used by the pros can be used by anyone now that Google exists,” he said.

One of Farley’s websites, WhatsTheHarm, attempts to calculate the harm of misinformation, whether it comes in the form of parents who won’t vac- cinate their children or people who rely on faith healing. As of November 26, 2014 the site listed the total harm at “368,379 people killed, 306,096 injured, and over $2,815,931,000 in economic damages.” These figures are anecdotal, and are based on the work of a group of volunteers who identify examples collected from news reports.

Another man, Robert Todd Carroll, has been engaged in skeptic work for two decades and maintains The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Like Randi, he said he doesn’t approach his work with a debunker’s mindset. “I don’t always begin an investigation with the idea of debunking an idea,” he said. “My initial inquiries into acupuncture and homeopathy, for example, were attempts to understand everything that was known about these practices and what scientific evidence there was for the many claims made about their efficacy. I ended up debunking both because the evidence led me to conclude that both are little more than placebo-based medicine, known to shamans centuries ago.”

Benjamin Radford, also a scientific investigator, echoed this: “Of course often a mystery is debunked when it is explained, but I try to remain open- minded about the subjects.” Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a nonprofit educational organization. He has written many books on skep- ticism, myths, and paranormal investigation, including (fittingly) Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us.

One skeptic who takes a very journalistic approach is Sharon Hill. Her web- site, Doubtful News, is her attempt to utilize SEO, clickable headlines, and other traffic-generating tactics to combat misinformation, dubious claims, and pseudoscience. “I try to get the story out as soon as possible and utilize important keywords in the story and the title,” she said. “Keywords really are key in getting search results. The earlier you can get eyeballs on that story, the more likely your story will come up in a search.”

Hill will also reach out to relevant online communities and aggregators to help her work reach a larger audience. “I attempt to promote the story to interested parties, if it might get attention on Reddit or Fark.com, if I think I have an interesting angle or catchy headline,” she said.

Hey! You should sign up for our weekly rumor roundup email.

Lessons From Debunking Efforts in Journalism and Elsewhere was originally published in First Draft Footnotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This research is collected in a detailed report that you can download and read for free. It’s called “Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation.” You can view the data we collected (and continue to collect) by visiting Emergent, our real-time rumor tracker.

Below is a report excerpt that offers a case study of the most debunked false rumor we tracked. The Emergent page with the data is here. If you like what you see, you should sign up for our weekly rumor roundup email.

On September 5, 2014 a Colorado web developer named Cosmo Catalano tweeted an image of a pumpkin spice-flavored Durex condom.

He created it in Photoshop to comment about all of the pumpkin spice offerings being rolled out for fall. His tweet initially received a few retweets, but over the ensuing days the image was scraped and reused by many other people on Twitter. It spread enough to capture the attention of a reporter at Quartz. She contacted Durex and its PR firm to ask if the condom was real. The answer she got back was equivocal, she said:

Several emails to Durex’s parent company, Reckitt Benckiser, and Virgo Health, the PR company that handles communications for Durex, didn’t yield a conclusive answer. A spokeswoman for Virgo Health said she couldn’t say whether the company was or was not actually developing such a thing.

That led to a story about the condom, which ran on September 8 with the original headline, “Durex will neither confirm or deny the pumpkin spice condom.” Other websites began to aggregate the story, though not in big numbers. We logged articles from Uproxx, Elite Daily, and PR Newser in the database.

A few hours after the Quartz story, BuzzFeed published an article with a definitive denial from the company: “Durex has heard that people are saying we launched a ‘Pumpkin Spice’ condom. We can’t claim this one, but we do love it when people spice it up in the bedroom.” The Durex Twitter account also pushed out that message. At that point, the rumor was debunked.

The pumpkin spice condom was one of the most successfully debunked claims in our research, and therefore offers some clues about strategies for effective debunkings. The first news organization to cover the story also demonstrated a responsible approach to covering unverified social content.

Key Takeaways

1. The claim picked up traction after it was debunked.

The below chart shows the number of shares for articles reporting the claim as false (red) versus those reporting it as true (green). (The gray bars represent articles that repeated the claim about there being a pumpkin-spiced condom.)

Contrary to the sharing trends we identified with other false claims, the pumpkin spice condom story saw the number of shares rise after it was confirmed false. This is because the vast majority of articles published were debunkings. This was also extremely rare.

We quickly identified and logged 16 debunking articles in the database, compared to the original four that reported the claim. (The Quartz and PR Newser authors soon revised their articles to reflect the fact that the condom was not real.)

We did not identify a single news article that wrongly reported this claim as true after it had been confirmed false. (The one story to report the condom as true came from Elite Daily and is the sole source of the green bar above.)

Based on the share trend and the number of debunking articles published versus those that reported the initial rumor, this was the most successfully debunked claim in the research.

2. It offers three clues to effective viral debunkings.

Why did this claim gain traction as a debunking? There are three likely factors.

A. Speed. Durex responded within a few hours of the first story being published. The claim had only been reported by four outlets at that point and had not yet gained serious traction. By acting quickly, Durex ensured the might-be-true narrative did not gain significant momentum.

B. Nature of the discussion prior to debunking. Anecdotally, the tweets examined in the course of tracking this claim rarely, if ever, declared the condom to be real. The discussion on Twitter was mostly of a joking nature related to the pumpkin spice craze. People were not focused on, or invested in, the element of verac- ity. They merely viewed the condom as an amusing idea.

C. Ability to maintain core virality. An examination of the text and tone of the debunking articles revealed that the articles were still able to take a fun, lighthearted approach to the story. The debunking didn’t ruin the joke; Durex’s playful response likely aided it.

In a Gawker comment thread about the tension between viral and true, Neetzan Zimmerman cautioned, “You really can’t have it both ways when it comes to viral content. If you want to capitalize on its sharing prowess and reap the [page views] that come with that, then you simply can’t take a hard- boiled approach to fluff.”

Critically, the pumpkin spice condom was still funny, even when called out as fake.

For example, the New York Daily News led its article with, “Oh my gourd it was a hoax!”192

But the most representative story came from MTV.com. It earned by far the most shares of any debunking claim. This was in part because its debunking also included suggestions for other amusing (and fake) Durex flavors, such as a Pulled Pork Flavored condom.

The fact that the condom wasn’t real didn’t spoil the joke or the opportunity for writers to capitalize on it in articles.

3. It demonstrated a more responsible approach to viral content.

Quartz was the first news organization to jump on this potentially viral story — but the way it approached the story demonstrated a level of restraint that others might considering emulating in the future.

It would have been easier and faster for Quartz to simply publish a post noting that people are talking about a possible pumpkin spice condom. That would have been a pure “journalism as an act of pointing” approach.

Instead, journalist Heather Timmons decided to reach out to Durex and its PR firm to see if she could answer a key question: Is it real? It was a jour- nalistic approach that didn’t prevent her from being first to the story. The fact that Timmons initially received an uncertain response from the PR firm enabled her to write a story that mentioned the possibility of its being real. (Once proven false, the Quartz story was quickly updated.)

This story showed that it’s possible to be early to potentially viral content, while still pursuing an element of reporting.

Hey! You should sign up for our weekly rumor roundup email.

That’s the headline on a recent Daily Mirror story, and it nicely sums up the basic details of this moderately viral tale.

At the rumor-tracking and debunking site Emergent.info, we currently have this claim marked as Unverified. But at least one core piece of evidence supporting it has been proven false, not that this had an effect on its spread from one media outlet to another.

As you can see from the Emergent claim page about the story, all of the usual viral news early movers have jumped on the story. And all of them have reported it as completely true.

None of the articles have quotes from the man, or from doctors or other officials, The only corroborating evidence is two images that allegedly show Ilic in the aftermath of his act.

This graphic shot is the most notable, and reportedly shows him:

Except, it doesn’t.

Thanks to reporting by Jack Werner at Metro Sweden, we know the image is actually from last year, and shows a Chinese man.

The folks at the Daily Mirror were well-positioned to spot the problem with the photo before publishing it. After all, they carried it almost exactly a year ago in a story headlined, “Unlucky in love man CHOPS OFF own penis because he was fed up with not having a girlfriend.”

(The other image in the stories is a generic shot of someone on a gurney. It could be from anywhere.)

Werner from Metro also tracked back the origin of the story to what appears to be a Macedonian TV report from October 22, a day before it hit the English-language press:

It includes the two images being used in the subsequent articles. Notably, many stories credit the images to EuroPics or CEN, two related agencies that have a history of pushing out fake and/or unsourced viral news images and stories.

See, for example, this story from just a few months ago that involves a real Russian bear attack, and a fake detail about a Justin Bieber ringtone.

As for this story? Maybe true, maybe fake. Probably the latter, but we don’t know for sure.

So there is sits for now, Unverified.

Originally published at emergentinfo.tumblr.com.