Filtering falsehood in the future

This past week, Facebook launched the FB Newswire, "...a resource for journalists that aggregates newsworthy social content shared publicly on Facebook by individuals and organizations." The service offers some hope that information shared through social media can become a bit more trustworthy, helping to clean up some of the misinformation and lies easily shared in an age where every person with a data line can publish content with very few restrictions.It's an important development when the largest network in history adds a feature with this much potential impact. One of the reasons we value social media is the ability to get updates as soon as content is posted. Facebook provides sharing among acquaintances, friends, and family members while Twitter provides a near endless churn of news from any and every account and hashtag you follow. If news happens, whether the news is personal or global, we can know about it within hours, minutes, and even seconds of its posting. Sadly, the strength of social media is also a weakness when misinformation or outright lies are shared at the same speed. As Winston Churchill said...A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.The new service is powered by Storyful, a news verification service designed to process news items and identify whether they are legitimate news items or something fake using a process that includes questions such as:Where is this account registered and where has the uploader been based, judging by their history?Are there other accounts – Twitter, Facebook, a blog or website – affiliated with this uploader? What information do they bear to indicate recent location, activity, reliability, bias, agenda?How long have these accounts been in existence? How active are they?Do they write in slang or dialect that is identifiable in the video’s narration?Can we find WHOIS information for an affiliated website?Is the person listed in local directories? Do their online social circles indicate they are close to this story/location?Does the uploader ‘scrape’ videos from news organisations and other YouTube accounts, or do they upload solely user-generated content?Are the videos on this account of a consistent quality?Are video descriptions consistent and mostly from a specific location? Are they dated? Do they have file extensions such as .AVI or .MP4 in the video title?Are we familiar with this account – has their content and reportage been reliable in the past?You can read examples of how the process works on the same page.As we can see, the process is an interesting mix of social and technical. It also might be an important development to support information fluency and helping bring trustworthy content to the front. Looking at the social impact, we should also ask how far this might go. At its heart, Storyful should offer a net gain for Internet users as long as the process remains fair and objective and the only people to lose traffic are the ones posting articles scraped from other sites, articles containing incorrect information, or purposely deceitful propaganda.Yet I'm guessing it can also be written to filter liberal or conservative opinion (part of a reason to doubt Storyful's trustworthiness now that it's owned by News Corp - hardly a fair and balanced organization of its own). When the process reaches that level of awareness, how will satire such as Onion articles be graded? While I was frustrated when taken in by a recent satirical series on an otherwise serious news site, it was so well written I was taken in hook, bait, and sinker (I'm pretty good at identifying satire, but satire that depicts Putin doing something believably insane is a pretty attractive worm on that hook).Taking it to the extreme, what about art that includes an image of a person, fiction about a group, or a video hoax made to prove a point - are these trustworthy or lies? Who decides?And what will this look like? If I had to guess long-term, I believe our social media could take a cue from email features and be sorted into various feeds like on gmail with the primary, social, and promotions tabs. Could my Facebook and Twitter feeds follow this design?If so, and I have the ability to personalize the settings, Storyful might be the start of something great. If not, I have to wonder how this impacts freedom of speech. How the software will mature in the future could have an impact on how many legitimate writers and artists lose their voices, or if content producers who live by the poison pen or through stealing content find their audiences dwindle when they are no longer able to get their feeds in front of so many eyes.