Media must avoid pitfalls of user-generated content

If there is one phrase that sums up the risk facing news operations that indiscriminately jump into the murky pool of user-generated content(UGC), it’s this: “Instagram storm”.

In 2012, we had our first such event during Hurricane Sandy, nicknamed the “Frankenstorm” because its fury was born from the freak coincidence of disparate weather factors. But the tag might also allude to Sandy’s mass experiment in citizen photojournalism that at one point saw users uploading images to Instagram at a rate of 10 per second.

If you work for social media news agency Storyful or a social media team such as those at the BBC, the Wall Street Journal or other legacy news organisations that bother with UGC, the posting of 1.3 million images is a verification challenge purely in volume terms, before you even consider how Instagram modifies “reality” – the photo network’s filters make it extremely easy for amateurs to create images as Gothic as anything Mary Shelley conjured with words.

Such ethical and practical matters were the subject of this week’s Google Hangout discussion on internet coverage of Sandy, hosted by Storyful at Google’s Dublin offices.

“In a weather event you have to be careful you’re not making something look worse than it is because you’re using the lo-fi filter or whatever,” noted Wall Street Journal social media director Liz Heron.

To some extent, Instagram’s success is not a massive problem, as the whole point of social media news teams is to serve as a UGC sifter for their bosses or clients, identifying what’s real, what’s a hoax, what’s valuable public service information and what’s a Photoshop parody of a scene from The Day After Tomorrow. In a natural disaster scenario, this might include contacting the source of the image and obtaining a non-filtered original. When there are gusts of 90mph knocking about, it’s no time for the news to be arty.

And yet, news media has a natural bias towards drama. The viciously black sky shot will always make a better photograph in news terms than an averagely sombre grey one. Outlets can be left looking very silly indeed if they combine this urge to overinflate – so that every storm becomes an Apocalypse – with what is often wilful ignorance about the correct procedures for responsible use of UGC.

Most media outlets are not so credulous that they will fall for the shark-in-urban-waters meme . . . not any more. But CNN and the Weather Channel still managed to propagate a hoax Sandy tweet that the New York Stock Exchange had flooded.

News operations that think of UGC as nothing more than cheap content – a substitute for expensive journalism – are more than likely doing it wrong. They are going for a stroll in a hurricane thinking a handbag-sized umbrella will keep their hair dry. They are conveniently forgetting what we might call the Tweetgate rule: contributions from users have to be both checked and placed in their correct context, just like any source. What? When? Where? The basics.

This either means staffing the process adequately in-house or outsourcing to an agency such as Mark Little’s Storyful, which employs around 30 people, 19 of whom are journalists toiling in the internet’s verification engine room.

With the suspicion aroused by amateur fakes now spreading to distrust in professional images, according to Heron, it is clearly in the interest of all news-gatherers that social media editor-types win their battle against the bogus.

Craig Silverman, editor of Poynter’s Regret the Error blog on media accuracy, told the Storyful Hangout that he was impressed by the number of news organisations that had made stabs at verification during Sandy and advocated more collaboration. Adam Blenford, the US-based news editor of the BBC News website, agreed he felt “no competition-based hesitation at sharing information”.

It often doesn’t take that much time to identify a fake, but any time at all in online media is too long, meaning news outlets are transmitting UGC with the proviso that it “cannot be independently verified”. It’s a catch-all line that risks being abused, Blenford observed.

“It’s not right to report that the stock exchange is under three feet of water, but that can’t be independently verified, because we’re in London and the stock exchange is in New York. That’s not true – it can be independently verified.”

The sales-pitch subtext of Storyful’s Hangout was clear: news outlets that take shortcuts on UGC will be found out. In the meantime, in the race to debunk fakes, we can surely all enjoy the idea that maybe, just maybe, it might rain hard enough to bring a shark to our front porch.