I do not come from a background of journalism, but rather one where journaling and voicing various realities is an urgency that lead myself and a lot of people I know into various forms of blogging, formal print, citizen-journalism, etc.

While I feel these forms of non-centric ventures of “telling the truth,” are crucial to the overall local/global narrative, their DIY “aesthetic” has opened much leeway to create fake and misleading content that is presented as truth-from-the-ground. I’m prompted by this example of a Vandalism in Brussels video to propose a possible tool for the newsroom. Before I get into that, the video’s story is similar to many videos that surface on online platforms that end up being debunked as inauthentic. There are two versions of the video, one ending with an “Allah Akbar” scream, and one without. It has been said that the “Allah Akbar” has been added to the video to further feed European Islamophobia. On social media platforms, this is hot stuff, and the “Allah Akbar” version has been viewed over 200,000 times.

With the speed of news and contemporary life, opinions are made on first reads/views without further investigation in the world of the mainstream. I speculate that not more than 10% of the above 200,000 views will rectify their impressions of Islam in Europe. Not a lot of people rectify their views on a lot of political issues on their own without the intervention of the media anyways.

In thinking of a potential tool that could change the newsroom, I would start by expanding the newsroom to include social media platforms as venues of uncurated content as well as traditional newsrooms. While there are a lot of differences, both are confronted with content they need to verify. What if there’s a tool that would automatically notify its viewer both in a media outlet office or in a newsfeed if the video they’re watching was edited or not. I’m not a coder, so I’m not sure how this could be done, but (1) I can draw an analogy with TrueCaller‘s spam alert. TrueCaller is a mobile application that crowdsources its users phonebooks to create a mega caller id system. It has an option to mark certain numbers as spam, and the entire TrueCaller community benefits from this information. Following this logic, this proposed tool could be a plug-in that is fed a binary “edited or not edited” tag to videos on the web by a media-watch crowdsource-operational team. This way, viewers do not rely on their contacts “sharing” a debunked video, but benefit from a global community working on that.

(2) In another presumably more complicated format, this tool could be developed by finding a way to scan a video for recorded natures. If there is a way to pin down whether the audio and the video were recorded together, or by the same device, ruling out doctored videos, then this could also be another way of going about it. In both cases, I see this as a plug-in in platforms where people already view videos as opposed to a specialized site that you need to go and verify videos, mainly due to fatigued audiences that won’t go the extra mile.