The news plays a critical role in civic engagement today. Our existing knowledge of an issue, the ability to identify with a cause, or empathize with a group within civic movements, often depends on how the news educates us about these. To deconstruct the influence of news in order to construct public opinion, design media campaigns, and strategize advocacy is key to improving civic engagement.

Media Cloud is a big data, open-source platform designed to bring together media and civic engagement. Developed by the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab (where I work as a researcher on this platform) and the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, this web-based tool aggregates news stories daily from over 50,000 sources across the world, and delivers analysis and visualizations on media influence and attention.

Citizens, activists, journalists, and others interested in media can use Media Cloud to provide data-based answers to questions such as how much news attention a topic received, which sources were influential in driving a specific conversation, what impact a media campaign had, how liberal versus conservative sources, or online versus traditional newspapers differ in their framing of an issue, and so forth.

Media Cloud has been used to assess campaigns such as Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Dalit Lives Matter in India, advocated to Indian news sources about coverage gaps around women’s issues, helped organizations like the Gates Foundation encourage local philanthropy in developing countries by mapping existing perceptions around the topic, identified strategic news partners for improved public health conversations, and mapped information availability around contraceptive use in Kenya and Nigeria.

Media Cloud has the potential for immense impact and can be used for various practices and in geographies around the world.

I’m a first year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies and a Research Assistant at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. Before coming to MIT, I was the Researcher on Central America at Amnesty International, based in Mexico City.  There I covered human rights issues in the region and led a year-long project on Central American migrants fleeing (and being deported back to) unrelenting violence. Before that I was the the Americas Program Researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, where I covered press freedom issues in Latin America and the United States. I’ve also worked as a freelance journalist and with a number of international NGOs and foundations throughout Latin America, predominantly in Argentina and Colombia, as well as in my home town of New York City. I’m a journalism junkie and film buff and am interested in looking at how to apply new narrative and storytelling techniques to the human rights issues I’ve been working on for the past several years, particularly in the area of freedom of expression.

On February 1st, the biggest daily newspaper in France, Le Monde, launched an initiative to combat fake news and biased information sources called « Décodex ». Or at least try to.

Décodex is made of several components. It consists in a search engine, Mozilla and Chrome add-ons, a Facebook Bot and pedagogical documentation on how to be a more careful online news reader. It catalogues 600 websites and classifies them according to their « reliability ». I put the term in quotation mark, as this reliability is assessed by the team building the tool, team called Les Décodeurs. Les Décodeurs is a branch of Le Monde specialized in data journalism and fact checking headed by Samuel Laurent.

Firefox add-on: -What does it mean? A barely reliable website propagating conspiracy theories. -Is this website reliable? This website regularly features fake news or misleading articles. Be careful and look other more reliable sources. If possible, look for the origin of the information.

The tool has a straightforward – yet arguably unattainable – ambition: verify if a website is, or not, reliable. It can be used by journalists, but also by anyone reading an article online. Its functioning is very simple, perhaps even too simplistic. You, curious yet naive reader (until now) surf the web, end up on a website, click on the Décodeurs extension that will give you one of the 5 following answers concerning the visited website’s credibility:

From Top to Bottom: [GREY] – Warning, this website is not a source, or its reliability is too variable to fit our criterias. To know more, look for other sources and the origin of the information. [BLUE] – Warning, this is a satirical website that is not made to propagate real information. It is a second degree read. [RED] – This website regularly propagates fake news or misleading articles. Beware and look for other more reliable sources of information. If possible, look for the origin of the information. [YELLOW] – This website can regularly be imprecise, not giving information about its sources and not conducting regular fact checking. If possible, search for the origin of the information. [GREEN] – This website is considered as reliable. Do not hesitate to confirm the information by looking for other reliable sources or the origin of the information.

In many instances, you will end up clicking on the link to the documentation, and learn how to find the original source of an information, and how to cross check what you are reading. If the website is not classified yet, you can also report it to the Décodex Team.

This documentation is, to me, the most innovative part of the tooI. I had never heard of any team in a newspaper sitting down to write proper guidelines to information search and evaluation. Perhaps because there are no definite guidelines, but I find the effort legitimate and fair in the current state of the industry, as social medias are blurring the line between fake and truth. At the heart of the Décodex initiative is the will to give the power back to the people and avoid the propagation of erroneous information. As they put it themselves, the tool represents « a first step towards mass checking information ». Hence, a democratization of the ability to identify what is reliable, and what is not. However, a first critique can already be made when looking at the Décodex classification. Websites categorized as « reliable » are mainly mainstream medias ( Le monde, NYT, CNN, etc…). Is it because you are an independent blogger that you are unreliable? Not necessarily, would I argue, but Décodex’s answer to this question is yes.

Additionally, the very existence of this tool triggers concerns. First of all, many websites, especially some that are considered as being on the right side of the political spectrum, have fired back at the initiative as some were classified by Décodex as « biased » newsources. Le Figaro rightfully asked the question « who will fact check the fact checkers? », and this is, I think, important: how can one claim, as Décodex seems to be doing, that she is completely unbiased, hence has the aptitude to judge others’ biases? How can one claim her classification of reliable sources is the « right one », that everyone should abide by? What prevents other sources to build the same tool, and classify the first classifier as non reliable in retaliation?
In some instances, however, the classification can hardly be argued. The Onion, for example, is classified as being parodic: everyone knows and acknowledges that The Onion is a satirist « news source ». The editors of the publication acknowledge it themselves and that is the very essence of their editorial line. The entire « not fully reliable category », is vague on purpose and encompasses platforms from breitbart.com to Russia Today. It seems hard to find generalized and cross cutting definitions of what makes a website enter this category.

Another important problem with this tool is the following: are the people who tend to share and read fake news going to use it? As a tool built by the mainstream media that is Le Monde, and the media undergoing an unprecedented credibility and trust crisis, is the initiative going to be considered as having enough credibility? Or is it going to be judged as biased and be a subject of an even more intense criticism? Is it going to be truste or not? Can it be relied on? A large amount of articles have been released criticizing the Décodex classification. Which brings in the big question: does Décodex even make a difference?

Hey, everyone! I’m Lauren, a first year MBA at MIT. I also like to call myself an engineer, web-developer, feminist, avid podcast listener, political junky, among other things.

I am in awe of everyone who introduced themselves on the first day of this course, and am excited to learn from the incredibly diverse set of people in the room throughout the semester.

As a kid, I had a “newspaper” I would create and pass out to our neighbors, who were kind enough to humor me. I didn’t end up becoming a reporter, but I have always been fascinated by and engaged with the world of civic media, even more so, in light of the recent election and the rise of “alternative facts”.

The election is not the only recent event that has me thinking more about the role of news in our society. As a former UVA student, I was rocked by the since debunked Rolling Stone article about a gang rape on UVA’s campus and was fascinated by the Washington’s Post analysis of the Rolling Stone’s mistakes.  I was especially struck by that author’s conclusion about the importance of supporting local news.

My goal of this course is to learn about more about this subject and become a better consumer, distributor and creator of content, especially where it supports the success of our democracy and society.

Fake news. Clickbait. Terms that I failed to really appreciate or understand for most of my life. Then, around November of 2016, I began reading the slew of articles coming out highlighting the prevalence and impact of the many articles and websites that were producing highly spun accounts of events at best, or just blatantly false accounts of events that never happened, at worst. What made this situation even scarier was reading articles such as this, which brought to the forefront the fact that the primary discovery vehicles so many people used to find their news (Google and Facebook) could so easily be manipulated by fake news creators.

If those articles got my attention and made me aware, it was stumbling upon this video that really put the fear in me…. (check out the below)

HOW in a world where technology can facilitate the creation and propagation of lies can we trust anything? HOW will we obtain information and educate ourselves on what is going on in the world beyond what our own eyes can see?

With this motivation, I wanted to spend the time this week exploring tools that can help combat this surge of fake news. After spending some time researching the topic, what I found could be broadly put into 2 categories:

1. Methods to understand if a piece of written work should be trusted
2. Tools to aid in validating that images or videos are authentic and have not been tampered with

I will be focusing on the 2nd, but before I do, I thought it would be important to call out a few links that touch on the 1st.

• This guide was put together by Melissa Zimdars and offers a great set of tips for analyzing news sources.
• This list of fake news sites can serve as a great quick check.

Validating Images

To assess the validity of images, there seems to be 2 predominant techniques or methods suggested: (1) reverse image searching to try and identify the origin of an image and see where else it has been published, and (2) data validation to try and identify when and with what device a photo was made, image characteristics, or perhaps even the place where a photo was taken. Collectively, this is called EXIF-data. In addition to EXIF-data, some tools run error level analysis (ELA) to find parts of a picture that were added with editing

Let’s explore one popular reverse image search tool called TinEye

While TinEye offers a host of products, I will focus on their free online tool. It works in a very simple way:

1. Find the url for the image you want to explore
2. Paste that url into TinEye
3. Receive back a list of all other sites on the web where this image has been used
4. Clicking on any of the returned images will pop up this web widget which allows you to quickly toggle back and forth between the 2 images (the original one you queried about and the similar image from a different website). This toggling UI makes it easier to spot differences in the images.

This service could prove useful in a few ways. First, TinEye will return images that are similar to the one you are searching for, so if you are wondering whether or not your image has been slightly modified via photoshop, this site will find those other similar photos and allow you to do quick comparisons (check out this example about pikachu). Second, since TinEye shows the urls for the other sites where the image shows up, you can easily scan those urls and see if some appear to be coming from questionable sites.

While this tool is great, and does serve a clear purpose, I do believe it is currently quite limited in the practicality of its use. Here are a few issues that come top of mind for me:

1. If you think about the workflow of this tool, its effectiveness depends upon a scenario where you have a real image, and then a shady author who tampers with that real image to then re-use it in nefarious ways. But what if you have someone who took the original picture, and then modified the original before uploading it anywhere? Not only does it seem like this tool would not catch such cases, but may actually add legitimacy to them if that modified photo starts to circulate on other websites.
2. Who exactly is this tool for? Is it for journalists who would like to include a certain image in an article before publishing? That seems to be the most likely case, though I would argue then that any journalist LOOKING to use such a tool is not the type of journalist we should be worried about spreading fake news. This tool is a great asset for the honest journalist, but, in a way, that does not protect us from the real problem, which brings me to….
3. What practical impact does this kind of a tool have on readers? Casual readers likely will not go out of their way when browsing through articles to go confirm the validity of an image. Fake news creators are not significantly deterred by the presence of this service, and that is the fundamental limitation of this tool.

TinEye is a great idea – it is a foundational capability. However, in today’s day and age, it does not quite do enough. After doing my research this week, I am left wondering, how can such tools be leveraged as the building blocks to construct a more active form of policing of online content.

PS: A brief aside on video validation. Videos are tough! Being a diligent journalist when it comes to verifying the authenticity of a video takes a lot of time and effort. Though I didn’t want to focus on this subject here, if you are interested in seeing a really thorough walkthrough that demonstrates just how much time and effort it takes, click here.

Hi there! I’m Drew, an undergraduate student at MIT studying computer science & electrical engineering, along with physics.

Motivation: I see journalism and participatory media as a great equalizer — holding powerful people and institutions accountable, while giving a voice to the voiceless. The democratization of media online these past two decades has brought more voices into the mix (a positive force), but at the cost of some veracity, responsibility, and credibility (a negative force). However, I believe there is no fundamental reason that the positive necessitates the negative — and rather that we are simply still waiting for a creative, new approach to media that will provide the benefits of journalistic democratization without sacrificing journalistic integrity.

Technology: programming since before I can remember; interned at Sony Ericsson and Khan Academy as a software developer in high school; co-founded and served as CTO of a start-up with 6 people; consulting at the World Bank on big data

Journalism: writing and editing for MIT’s school newspaper, The Tech; reported on the Boston Marathon bombing trial from the courtroom for half a year; interviewed people such as IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde

Random life experiences: biked across the U.S.; worked in a quantum computing lab; built iOS apps in ’09; got rid of my smartphone for a dumbphone

Twitter: @drew_bent
Website: www.drewbent.com