Picture courtesy Mosireen on Flickr.

1. Who is the original source?

Every piece of news has a source – the person who told you the news.  Who is the source of the report you are seeing? Do you know who the original source is? If not try to find out.  if you’re on Twitter, ask the Twitter user who she heard from.  Or you could run some advanced searches to find the earliest mention of this news.

(Advanced search: Twitter  – YouTube — Google)

2. Is the source credible and authentic?

Is it likely the person who told you this news is close to the story?  You hear some news from Suez from a Twitter user – is this Twitter user registered in Suez? Has she been tweeting about Suez recently, or with other Twitter users from there and in a local lingo? Has the source been active for some time? If not, the account may be used to spread disinformation.  Does the source have consistent accounts on a number of different social media – if so she is more likely to be real?  If the source is a blog or website, check who owns it with Who.is.  Or if email, check its location – find out more here.

(Check users and companies across the web: Rapportive – Identify – Polaris)

3. What does the source want to achieve by sharing this news?

All sources come with a particular viewpoint which affects how and why they report the news.  NATO will talk of ‘civilian casualties’ caused by its 2011 campaign in Libya, while Human Rights Watch will talk of ‘civilian deaths’. Ask, is this source working for a political party, a government agency, a particular company, an activist network or a media group? Check that and assess whether the association undermines the credibility of the information being reported.

4. Is the report new?

Often an old story gets picked up and circulated in social media.  You could use Google advanced search to check for previous references to the story.  If it is an image, there are tools to help you check it is original and new, such as TinEye and Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer.  Duplication on YouTube is a particular problem, so be especially careful there. Run a weather search on Wolfram Alpha (eg. search for ‘Weather today at 10.30 in damascus’.)

(Check images and videos are new: TinEye — Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer — Wolfram Alpha)

5. Is the report accurate?

As a rule of thumb, if you don’t know whether a statement is true or false, check.  Check the location of videos by looking for statues and notable buildings and then cross-reference these
on a map.  Listen to accents to check they are from the same area as the video.  Check photos carefully to see whether they have been altered.  JpegSnoop can help with this. If you are trying to check the accuracy of a factual statement that seems improbable,  check it is not a common internet myth that has been recreated using Snopes.

(Mapping tools: Wikimapia — Open Street Map – Google Maps – Bing Maps)

6. Is the report consistent?

Is the report internally consistent?  A report that is confused, inconsistent, or hazy is less likely to be credible.  Try to enrich the report you have with other sources and types of media.  The ideal would be to have text statements, images and video from different sources that show the same thing.  Try also to bring together reports from different languages. In Egypt, for example, you could check that the Arabic language and English language bloggers are saying the same thing.  Because they blog in different languages, they are likely to represent different networks, meaning you have more chance of bringing together two independent witness statements.  If you don’t speak the language, there are tools to help you.

(Search for information in Arabic: news.meedan.net — Yamli.com — Google Search Translated Foreign Pages)

If you are unsure, don’t share the report – or ask more questions of the people who are reporting this news.  If you think the report is credible, show the steps you’ve taken to check this.

This post used a number of brilliant articles:

http://onlinejournalismblog.posterous.com/content-context-and-code-verifying-informatio

http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/best_practices_for_social_medi.php?page=all

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2012/03/30/jpod-advice-on-verifying-social-media-content-and-correcting-errors/

For more links like these see:

http://www.diigo.com/user/gweyman/verification

The training in Mansoura was part of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University to train citizen journalists to improve their work with social media.

We discussed many points, including the difference between news and information, the importance of verifying news and writing reports from posts by different citizen journalists.

As we went through presentations published on http://arabcitizenmedia.org, we had several long and interesting discussions reflecting the variety of our group.

Some of the trainees were students; others were working with the local newspaper and our host for the two days, Sa7afat Welad el-Balad. Other participants were responsible for the websites and media of liberal political groups like April 6 and ElBaradei’s campaign or the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party in their city.

It was also exciting to have two trainees from outside Mansoura, coming from Damietta to join us.

During the workshop, I wanted to highlight the relationship between social and mainstream media. We discussed this while going through the platform developed by Meedan and adopted by Al-Masry Al-Youm. The platform would help in bridging the gap and building trust between journalists and citizen journalists, thus leading to a healthy, complementary relationship between the two sides of any story.

We also discussed how citizen journalists could build their credibility with followers and readers, by always mentioning the source of the news and trying to verify everything they haven to seen with their own eyes through different sources.

During one of the sessions, participants were divided into three groups, where each was asked to write a series of tweets or Facebook updates about a certain event. One group wrote about protests in Damietta, the second group wrote about protests in Mansoura and clashes when two senior MBs were giving an address there, the third group wrote about our workshop.

After discussing the tweets and how we could have made them better, the groups exchanged the material with each other. Then each group was asked to write a blog or a report from their colleague’s tweets.

The next day, each person presented a blog post they wrote. Trainees then provided feedback on each other’s posts, and voted on the best report whose writer was awarded a Flip camera.

We ended our workshop by going through more presentations, including the publishing offences and Creative Commons so that they would know their rights and how to protect themselves.

I enjoyed the workshop very much, as it gave me the chance to share experiences with this great group of people. I really hope they enjoyed it too and look forward, as much as I do, to share posts on the Facebook group we created to continue our discussions on their work.

The award will support Meedan designers and developers to tackle one of the very thorniest problems of the social web: how news teams can better verify breaking stories from the Middle East using citizen reporting.

We are honored to count IPI as a funding partner, putting us as it does in the company of some very high profile grantees, including AFP Foundation, Media Trust, The Guardian, The Poynter Institute and IREX. We are also delighted to see so many innovative training programs for the Middle East, including a Digital Media Training program in Upper Egypt and a Digital Journalism Training Boot Camp in Jordan.

This contest is a new initiative designed specifically to support and promote journalism innovation in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.  Jeff Jarvis, Daoud Kuttab, Chris Kabwato, Tony Daro and Her Royal Highness Princess Rym Ali are among the contest’s reviewers.

Meedan’s work on Checkdesk has been generously supported with an initial grant from Sida.  The project combines innovative technologies with social media trainings (with Noha Atef from Birmingham City University in the UK and a stellar set of citizen journalists, including Ramy Raoof, Tarek Amr and Lilian Wagdy) and formal media partnerships.

As such it brings content creators and journalists together with technologists and trainers in service of bridging citizen media and the professional newsroom in the Arab region during this most critical moment in the region’s history.

Yesterday I came back from Alexandria after spending two days in a workshop with an amazing group of young men and women. The workshop is one of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University to enhance the skills of citizen journalists in generating content on and from online media and train them on verification techniques for content on the web. Other workshops took place in Cairo with Lilian Wagdy and in Mahalla with Tarek Amr.

While designing the workshop and planning the methodology, I came up with several activities and games to deliver the key ideas of each session and facilitate the participants in reaching their own conclusions in a friendly and approachable manner. Rather than relying on Powerpoint presentations and a trainer-centric talk, I helped the participants think together and share their views constructively. The 11 trainees – all from Alexandria – were from a diverse range of backgrounds and with differing viewpoints, and this was of real benefit to the workshop and the discussions.

The first session of day 1 was about “Information and News,” with the main goal being to discuss the differences and criteria for generating information and news. In this activity, I divided the participants into pairs (X and Y) and gave them 10 minutes to get to know each other more. Then I asked every X i to tell the group one piece of information and one piece of news about Y and vice versa – without telling the group, what was “news” and what was “information”. After hearing 20 pieces of news and information, each participant gave their impression and decided what was news, what was information, and why. Another session was on how to verify content on the web and to methods to confirm citizen media; the sessions discussed some technical tools and various practices and tips to help verify a video on YouTube or a photo on Flickr, for exmaple.

We also had a session on how to develop a report based on online content. For instance, how to write a story on a topic using tweets, videos and other user-generated content. Again I divided the participants, but into two groups instead of pairs, and gave each group a document on this topic and asked them to brainstorm and come up with tips, best practices and challenges. After this, I asked them to choose any topic they prefer and write a blog post based on content from online media platforms. The majority of the participants published their reports on their blogs, including one trainee who created a blog for the first time in order to publish their post. We discussed each post and gave group feedback, voting on the best report and awarding the winner a Flip HD Mini.
The most interactive session was on ethics, criteria and values: I gave each participant a worksheet with keywords, tags, situations and questions. The trainees were divided into discussion groups to see where they agree and disagree, and answer questions such as “what would you do if…” . Everyone had different arguments and opinions.

The best thing was that the every participant felt free to speak and share their views without hesitation or fear. Every trainee came up with creative ideas and practices, and the group quickly developed a firm friendship in their very short time together.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Egyptian city of Mahalla El-Kubra for the first time, to lead one of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and Birmingham City University that aim to train citizen journalists in how to look at citizen media with a journalistic eye. The prominent blogger and tweep, Lilian Wagdy, gave the first training in Tahrir Lounge in Cairo, and then came my turn to give the second training in the Egyptian Democratic Academy in Mahalla. More workshops are to take place in other Egyptian governorates in the coming weeks.

Some 25-30 young people from Mahalla attended my two-day workshop. I kicked things off by asking them the difference between between “News” and “Information”, and that led us to talk about social media, and how one can find news (and information) there. The second session was about “Finding News Sources on Twitter”, and we went on to discuss Egyptian law and the so-called “Publishing Offences”. The fourth session was about Creative Commons, its different licensing options and how one can find content published under CC licenses. Two sessions followed: one about “Folksonomy, Geo-tagging, and the different meta-data that can be assigned to videos, photos, and other online content”, and another about news curation and “How to create news stories using social media updates”. We then used the knowledge learnt in the previous sessions to discuss “Techniques for Verifying Tweets and Photos published online”. Finally I gave the trainees a brief introduction to tools such as URL shorteners, Del.icio.us, and some other tips and tricks useful for citizen journalists.

Early on in the workshop, I noticed that Facebook was more popular among the trainees than Twitter and blogs, so I quickly taught trainees some basic skills in Twitter, and how to create a new blog on Blogspot and start publishing posts. The trainees were given assignments to create blogs of their own if they do not have one already, then use the knowledge learnt previously to publish a post that summarizes a discussion taking place on social media, i.e. curate those tweets and statuses updates and create a news story. By the end of of the workshop, we showed entries from the different trainees – including their Facebook notes – and asked the others to comment on them and offer constructive criticism. We held a vote for the best two entries, with the top two trainees winning a Flip Mini HD.

Mahalla is an industrial city of almost half a million residents. It’s where, on April 6, 2008 textile workers went on strike, demanding improved wages and criticizing the Mubarak regime for rigged elections. The April 6th Youth Movement, a key player in the uprising which started on January 25, 2011, was formed initially in solidarity with the Mahalla workers, and the strikes are believed to be one of the major steps that led to the Egyptian revolution 3 years later. Mahalla’s recent history as a hub of dissent against the regime was clear in the political awareness of the trainees, and social and political discussions permeated the workshops. Most of the trainees are already members of the many political parties and movements. One day after the sessions – even at the end of a long day – the trainees took to the streets to paint lane-markings on nearby roads and pavements in collaboration with the April 6th Movement. In order to avoid having to wait for the government to provide the service, the youth got permission from local authorities, fundraised for the required materials, and decided to take it upon themselves to renovate their city. The political makeup of the group was mixed: most of the trainees were members of liberal political parties and movements, with just a few supporters of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties. The trainees had a good grounding in media knowledge, with most of them having encountered Mahalla’s local newspapers and radio stations, and some of them even having worked or volunteered there.

As Lilian Wagdy previously highlighted, the ultimate goal of these workshops is to introduce trainees to a reporting platform developed by Meedan and adopted by one of Egypt’s best-known independent newspapers, Al-Masry Al-Youm. The platform, http://liveblog.almasryalyoum.com, is designed to support citizen journalists to verify and disseminate important citizen reporting, and to encourage mainstream journalists to feel more secure in using citizen media content. Introducing the trainees to the platform and giving them an overview of how to use it was thus an important part of the workshop.

Many of the slides used in the workshop, as well as other useful resources on the following website: http://arabcitizenmedia.org/

The above paragraph is an excerpt of the description of the Global Censorship Conference that was held at Yale Law School March 30 – April 1. I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Lina Attalah, Managing Editor of Al Masry Al Youm (AMAY), discussing case studies of censorship.

The panel discussed censorship in different countries including India, Brazil, USA. Lina and I talked about Egypt and Syria respectively.

Egypt

Lina talked about censorship during, and after, the Jan 25 revolution that toppled the Mubarak regime. In his attempts to reign in the revolution, Mubarak first attempted to block social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. When that failed, he ordered ISPs to cut off internet access in Egypt entirely.

During those days, Speak2Tweet emerged, and it allowed Egyptians to call specific numbers and record voice message that were automatically tweeted for the world to hear. Meedan helped with the effort to recruit and manage volunteer translators and set up a website to publish transcription and translation of more than 1600 voice messages to Speak2Tweet.

Earlier this year, Lina faced another form of censorship in repressive environments — self-censorship. Egypt Independent, an English language weekly publication that Lina manages, had their second issue internally censored after an article criticizing the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) “raised objections from the chief editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm, our Arabic-language sister paper after Egypt Independent had gone to press.”

The Egypt Independent team decided to discontinue printing until they secure their own license separate from Al Masry Al Youm. This will ensure their editorial independence and relieve AMAY from repercussions of the material Egypt Independent publishes.

Syria

Censorship in Syria is synonymous with the Ba’ath regime. After independence, over 150 publications were established in Syria. When the Ba’ath Party came to power after a coup in 1963 they banned all publications except for a newspaper issued by the party, considering them “anti-revolutionary” publications.

The number slowly grew to 3 national state-owned publications over the years. Private publications were allowed after 2000 and generally avoided covering politics.

The regime’s modus operandi of censorship and banning extends to other mediums and technologies. Satellite TV was initially banned, Internet was initially introduced to the public around 2000 and has been heavily monitored and censored ever since. Even seemingly harmless technologies like GPS were banned until very recently.

Facebook, Youtube, and Blogger were all blocked in 2007. The internet was providing spheres for like-minded Syrians to discuss and exchange ideas and experiences, as well as organize and campaign for social and legislative change. Several bloggers and online journalists were arrested and received prison sentences ranging 3-5 years on average.

When the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt happened. The Assad regime unblocked youtube and facebook after blocking them for years. It was a demonstration of “confidence in the people” according to Syrian officials. The move was nothing more than the regime flexing its muscles and showing off its total control of the population.

The regime was overconfident. Protests in Syria started on March 15 aided by social media for organizing and disseminating information about the protests and the brutal crackdown.

In the past year, Assad tried various methods to censor communication between activists, and stem the tide of information coming out from citizen journalists in the country. Internet is cut off repeatedly in areas where military crackdown is taking place; several communication apps and platforms such as Skype, whatsapp, and VoIP are now blocked; the Internet connection speeds are throttled countrywide. This makes it extremely hard for Syrians to communicate, find critical information relevant to their situation.

In addition to that, the regime used social media platform as an intelligence tool. Arrested activists were forced to handover their login information exposing the information of their contacts and previous communication logs. There’s also evidence that the regime spread malware and used man-in-the-middle attacks to steal login credentials and spy on activists.

SOPA/PIPA, CISPA, and beyond

Unfortunately, online censorship isn’t limited to authoritarian repressive regimes. Meedan has participated in a global campaign to oppose Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US that would have had dire implications to the freedom of speech worldwide.

SOPA and PIPA were defeated, but now another bill is being introduced with even worse implications on privacy and freedom of speech online. Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA) is controversial cybersecurity legislation that would negate existing privacy laws and allow companies to share user data with the government without a court order. Visit the EFF to take part in the campaign against CISPA.

The fight against censorship is an uphill battle. It is ongoing, and every netizen can — and should — take part.

To help us with our outreach to citizen journalist and training logistics for our workshops outside of Cairo, we found two fabulous partners working on truly inspiring projects in Egypt’s governorates:

Go Local, or Sa7afet Welad Elbalad is a project working to develop independent local media outlets outside of Cairo. Since its beginnings in Spetember 2011, Go Local has established four multi-platform media outlets, in Alexandria, Mansoura, Naga Hamadi and Dishna, providing everything from journalism training to capacity development.

Here’s an example of their fabulous work: Welad el-Balad produced in the Delta city of Mansoura:

For more about Go Local, check out their beautiful website: http://sa7afa.org and follow them on Twitter (@Sa7afetElBalad) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Sa7afetWeladElBalad).

The Egyptian Democratic Academy is a non-profit organization working in support of freedom, democracy and human rights. EDA’s offices throughout Egypt work on a variety of programmes, from running ElMa7rousa Radio to running crowdsourced election monitoring projects such as U-Shahid. You can find their website here: http://egyda.org/ and follow on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EgyDemoAcad).

We would like to express our sincere thanks to both partner organizations, and also to Tahrir Lounge, who recently hosted our trainers’ gathering and our Cairo training workshop. It is an honour to work with such exciting and inspiring projects, with whom we share so many common goals and values.

A:”And the idea to pass through us state security and change its name to the national security state security roles ended most bureaucratic de gain important o need protection”

B:”De you keep optimistic industry”

A:”Roles of bureaucracy, Red Hat is an example of security approval bitalb place before appointment?”

B:”Less its Pilgrim … Hat one bikodm mabikodmsh military college and its answer file security … Le son aunt Uncle father entered before keda. section. Bitrvd”

Who is trying to pass US State Security? Who or what are Red Hat and Pilgrim? What kind of code are “bikodm mabikodmsh” and “bitalb”?

After a few hours of speculation over whether Michael Cera was involved in some sort of national conspiracy, we asked our Arabic-speaking cousin Abu Meedan to intervene. One glance at the source and he reliably reassured us that we had unwittingly witnessed a fascinating discussion on the changes to Egypt’s State Security apparatus post-uprising:

The big news here is that, quietly and to a “handful of users” Twitter has rolled out an auto-translate feature for testing. The feature allows users to read a translation of any tweet in “your” language (presumably the one you choose for your Twitter interface) courtesy of Bing’s translation API (also adopted recently by Facebook – a topic for future rumination).

At Meedan, we love Twitter. We love translation. And we love translating Twitter. On one level, it’s exciting that Twitter are acknowledging the importance of translation in their architecture. This is not before time, as the number of Tweets in English has declined from almost two thirds in 2009 to 39% today. But as the example above proves, the model of pure Machine Translation is a problematic one for the social web: MT renders vernacular almost completely meaningless. ( N.B. This is certainly not a problem confined to Bing, and this post is not written to highlight Bing’s failinfs here, but rather to emphasise the problem with Machine Translation itself and the richness of vernacular language; Google’s translation renders arguably worse results: “less Haaajh .. Hat one Baiqdm in a war college Mabaiqdamish security and file his decision to answer … If cousin with his father entered the section before this .. Batervd” and Meedan: less حاااجة … Give me one, the military مابيقدمش Security file and bring his decision … If the son of son’s father entered the department … بيترفض )

This is particularly the case in Arabic, where MT is trained to a standard form almost never found in use on Twitter or Facebook, where users talk in dialect and frequently use a Latin-alphabet version of dialect, but it’s also an issue for other languages too.

To translate Twitter in a meaningful way, then, we need to look beyond pure Machine Translation to a model that makes translating tweets fun, scaleable and rewarding. Here’s why we think it’s important, and here’s how we’re thinking about how to do it.

Do you translate tweets? Have you ever been browsing Twitter and wanted a translation? We’d love to hear from you and love to talk about these important ideas. Do comment on this post, or on our Knight Foundation application for Translatedesk, and send us a tweet @meedan!

This gathering is the kick-off event for the Catalyst for Change global game, which will run for 48 hours, April 3-5. The goal? To engage people from all over the world in finding thousands of paths out of poverty over the next decade.

The game is trying to catalyze a chain reaction of solutions to the problems of poverty in every country in the world. There are thousands of untapped ideas that can lead to smarter communities, more resilient households, stronger citizens, and more hopeful futures for the billions of poor or vulnerable people on the planet. The Catalysts for Change game is designed to tap those solutions.

The game will be joined by 10 global Searchlight Partners who have been working closely with the Rockefeller Foundation to build foresight and a futures perspective on issues of poverty and equity, along with more than a dozen Community Partner organizations from around the world.

Check out the Catalyst for Change game at http://catalyze4change.org

“4 injuries in #IraqBorin near #Nablus .one of them is serious and one serious injury in #KuforQaddoum weekly demo #LandDay,” reports one user.

Palstinians protest in Nilin, 2010. Picture courtesy of ISM Palestine on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

But how do you sort the accurate and important reporting in this stream?  And how do you corroborate these reports with other citizen media on YouTube, Facebook and Flickr?

As part of a multi-year Middle East citizen journalism project supported by the Swedish International Development Agency, Meedan and Ma’an News Agency will be seeking to tackle this problem.

Ma’an is one of the most respected news agencies in the region, noted for its independence and professionalism, so it is very exciting for Meedan that Ma’an has agreed to partner on this project.

In the project, Meedan will be developing tools for Ma’an to gather, sort, verify and publish citizen reporting from the ground, all with the help of its news community.  These tools are already in use in a phased beta by Egypt’s leading independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.

“We are very excited about the project, and are looking forward to expanding our capacity to report events like today’s Land Day protests through high quality citizen media,” said founder Raed Othman.

“We think we can provide not just Palestinians but the whole world with a new light on the Palestinian experience and daily events in this important region.”