How Journalists and Social Media Users Perceive Online Fact-Checking and Verification Services (original) (raw)
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Social media are increasingly used as a news source by journalists all over the world. To ensure credibility and gain the public’s trust, the verification of social media content and sources is critical to journalists and news organisations. We report on findings from qualitative interviews conducted with 24 journalists working with social media in major news organizations in Europe. We identified five working practices concerning the verification of social media content and sources. Further, we found that fast-paced news publishing in an environment with information overload is perceived as a key challenge for journalists. To avoid trade-offs between verification and fast-paced publishing, journalists need efficient and easy-to-use support both in the verification process and in structuring and organising an overwhelming amount of social media content. Our findings contribute new knowledge on journalists' social media working practices and suggest user requirements for future innovations in tools to support the verification of social media content
Trust and Distrust in Online Fact-Checking Services
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Though fact-checking services play an important role countering online disinformation, little is known about whether users actually trust or distrust them. The data we collected from social media discussions—on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, and discussion threads in online newspapers—reflects users’ opinions about fact-checking services. To strengthen trust, fact-checking services should strive to increase transparency in their processes, as well as in their organizations, and funding sources
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This article evaluates the extent of social media policing in fact-checking (as opposed to verifying public figures' statements) and the thematic convergence across eight countries in Europe and Latin America. Based on audience reach, we collected links from various organizations (independent outlets, legacy media, or global news agencies). A representative stratified sample of 25% resulted in 3,154 articles. Among the findings, the trend of social media policing prevails across countries and organizations, except for most European legacy media. Independent news-born factchecking organizations follow a convergent path, sharing more similarities with their global counterparts than their national media peers.
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The current media ecosystem, derived from the consolidation of Information and Communication Technologies, shows a scenario in which the relationship between the media and their audience is being redefined. This represents a challenge for journalistic practice. In the digital age, the public actively participates in the construction and dissemination of news through social networks. Faced with this loss of control by the media, fake news and disinformation are emerging as one of the main problems of journalistic practice in a competitive business context, and with a high saturation of news content. In this situation, fact checkers emerge as key players in the information verification process. This research comparatively analyses the main fact checkers in Spain and the United Kingdom through content analysis applied to their corporate websites to understand their characteristics and working methodologies. The results underline that they are concerned with the concepts of transparency...
Observatorio (OBS*)
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The role of journalists, and journalism has progressed into a more digitalized journalism. Social Networking Sites (SNSs) allow people to take part in online activities and remove the barrier for online users to publish and share information at any place at any time. This article intends to show that credibility of social media is a key factor that enhance public engagement and communication effectiveness in the digital/social media, and the factors that could affect the credibility of news from SNSs. Based on the literature review, this article reviews journalists’ awareness of SNSs; an understanding of what constitute ‘news credibility’ is pursued; and finally, this article compares SNSs news credibility to traditional media; and journalists’ dependence on SNSs for news content. The review suggested various factors affect the credibility of news from the new media, which is linked to journalism work. These include: the interactive media, technology acceptance, quality of news’ sou...
The Importance of Verifying News on Social Media
2018
The Importance of Verifying News on Social Media Yumi Wilson, San Francisco State University, United States A review of previous and current research on the rise of "fake news" on social media and what is being done to address the problem; the potential negative effects of relying on social media for news (echo chambers, false or inaccurate information, and the lack of an effort by consumers to learn more by going to the actual source of information). This presentation and paper also offer journalists and aspiring journalists some strategies on how to verify news and information found on some of the major social media networks. iafor The International Academic Forum www.iafor.org The Importance of Verifying News on Social Media "The purpose of journalism is not defined by technology, nor by the journalists or the techniques they employ," the authors wrote in their book, The Elements of Journalism. "The principles and purposes of journalism are defined by something more basic; the function news plays in the lives of people." 1 Facebook has two billion active users and a majority of those users get news on the site, according to the Pew Research Center. "Looked at as a portion of all U.S. adults, this translates into just under half (45 percent) of Americans getting news on Facebook." 2 Pew also found that 18 percent of all Americans now get news on YouTube and 11 percent get news on Twitter. 3