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How To Verify A Tweet

Posted by Craig Kanalley | Posted in How To's | Posted on 25-06-2009

Comments

Twitter is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 10,000, you can break news. That’s because all tweets are recorded and indexed at search.twitter.com. If someone types the right keyword(s), they can find your tweet.

Breaking Tweets prides itself on giving many different types of Twitterers credit for breaking news, whether it be someone in Honduras with a dozen followers recording the first “earthquake” tweet or a news organization providing the first details of a major story.

But how do you know a tweet’s legitimate?

Here’s some methods I use at Breaking Tweets that you can try too:

1. Timestamp: Anytime something breaks with hundreds of tweets in minutes, like a natural disaster, it’s good to type various keywords and keep paging back until you find the first few tweets about the news. Unless these Tweeters are psychic, they’re probably among the first to have knowledge something’s up and they may have additional context depending on the story.

2. Contextual tweets: Immediately check the Twitter user’s page for related tweets around the tweet you found. You’d be surprised how often someone posts a follow-up tweet later or precedes the ‘breaking tweet’ with other pertinent info. This could provide additional context for the story, but it can also help verify a person, especially if they’re posting pictures or other content from the scene.

3. Authority: Check the Twitter user’s Bio. Is this a journalist? Is it a random person off the street? Is it a prankster? How about a comedian? Check their Web site or blog if they have one listed. See what you can learn about them here. It’s important to have some idea who the Tweeter is as you assess the validity of any tweet.

4. How many past tweets: Be leery of new Twitter users. If it’s one of their first tweets, it could be anybody starting an account and claiming to have info on a breaking story. The newer the account is, the more skeptical you have to be.

5. What are the past tweets: Check for context by examining the person’s Twitter stream. Go back several pages and see what they normally tweet about. Do they interact with people? Check the accounts they interact with for additional background on piecing together who this person might be. If they say they’re in Paris, are they talking about Paris a month ago? Are they tweeting in French? If not, why not? Evaluate the person and get a feel from them as best you can based on past tweets.

6. Google them: Google their Twitter name because sometimes people use a Twitter handle as their user name on other sites. See if you can find a LinkedIn page, a Facebook page and other sites that add to who these people might be. If they don’t list a full name on their Twitter page, and their user name doesn’t turn up much, you have reason to be more skeptical. The more information the person hides, the harder it is to know who they are. Likewise, the more open they are with info, the more likely they’re legitimate.

7. Check for related tweets: If someone says they heard an explosion in Lahore, what are other people in Lahore tweeting about? Check that and see if anyone else is reporting this. Chances are if a series of diverse people are tweeting about it at the same exact time — and they don’t appear related from looking at their accounts –, something’s up.

8. Talk to them directly: Send an @ reply. Start following them and try to send a direct message. Get a conversation going. Ask for more information and build a relationship as best you can. This will help you create a profile of this person and piece together their connection to the story.

These are ways that Breaking Tweets works to verify a tweet. It’s all about context, really – the person’s past tweets, other tweets that support their tweet, seeking more information about them specifically, and seeking more information about the topic.  And of course the timing of the tweet is critical too. If you stay on top of the tweets and follow these sorts of steps to verify tweets, you’ll be well on your way to finding great story tips and breaking news well before traditional methods.

  • What about completing with 123prople & alike ?
  • ckanal
    123people is actually a great resource, yes. Didn't know about it until your comment - thanks.
  • Jack Rosenberry
    Craig:
    In another of your blog posts you wrote "It's up to you (the reader) to figure out what's reliable and what's not," and I guess the standards in this post are part of your formula for doing that. But what I find interesting about these standards is how closely aligned they are with credibility standards of traditional journalism: Know your sources. Rely on best sources, the ones in a position to really know what you are reporting.
    But two observations:
    1) I guess I still wonder how in a virtual world, where identity can be almost completely disassociated from expression, you can ever reach verification standards that match what journalists are able to achieve when they know sources face to face. Your tips are good guideposts to avoid being taken in by complete hoaxes/scams. But it's still not quite the same as knowing that your tipster on a sensitive story really does have access to the information he/she is passing along because you know and trust them based on personal association. "Crowdsourcing" is great, but just because a dozen or 100 people are saying something doesn't necessarily verify it as accurate.
    2) This puts the burden on the readers to apply standards of journalistic verification to everything they run across, which assumes they have the willingness and expertise to do that. Your training as a journalist and your own sense of what it takes to verify things mitigates the need for this somewhat for readers of BT. But in a more general sense, is it fair to assume that all readers have these qualities?

    Jack
  • ckanal
    Thanks for the comment Jack. Great insight. I agree that this is similar to credibility standards of traditional journalism, just transferred over to a new medium.

    As for your observations, first, I agree there is no way to replace face-to-face communication and personal relationships. However, one of my primary points here is context, and a source on Twitter could for instance be a close friend to someone you trust if you piece through their profile and learn more about them (and their associations). Also, one thing I mention is checking the person's Web site or blog. If a prominent figure like a politician or athlete is on Twitter and you can verify it's actually them from their official Web site, their tweets can be (and have been) useful as well.

    Going back to traditional journalism, sometimes you start with a tweet, and that gives you a story tip which you then follow up via traditional means. This post is just a starting point, a set of guidelines if you will, to vet a tweet as best possible, and a way as you say to sort between junk and potentially valuable info.

    As for your second point, I agree with it completely. It's not fair to expect every reader to have these same standards, though in a perfect world, they'd at least be conscious of implications and think before they tweet possible misinformation.
  • Jack Rosenberry
    And, good observations on your part, as well. Certainly tweets from known sources -- friends/associates with whom you've built up a relationship, online or off -- are as credible as any other communication from them. Ditto verified messages from a public figure; tweets from them are no different from an e-mail, Web post or (in the olden days) paper news release coming from them. And certainly the idea of using a tweet, or series of them, as news tips is a very valid strategy. Where there's smoke there's often fire, and reporters have often used unverified information all the way down to anonymous letters or phone calls as the starting point to pique their curiosity in a topic and begin the proper research and vetting process.

    My main reservation is the challenge of judging the context properly. Your examples in your post, and mine in the last paragraph, are easy calls for attaching credibility to the info, no different than talking on the phone with a known and reliable source.

    But I noticed one of the first stories you did on Chicago BT was about the heat wave. Suppose someone had tweeted "This heat is something; an old woman in my apartment building died from it today." Now, how would you handle that? It's real news if a heat wave becomes a killer heat wave, and you might be first with that story -- if the tweet is reliable.

    But how do you verify it before you use it? Old-fashioned cop reporting? Since you don't know where or when you'd need to call every precinct in Chicago to check. Crowdsourcing? If you re-tweet among your network it looking for verification, that could turn into rumor-mongering, And that runs the risk of the same echo-chamber effect I mentioned in my first post (just because 100 people say it doesn't make it so). I don't disagree with you about the importance of context but what type of context do you seek in a case such as that?

    I'm not trying to be argumentative here. Despite my roots in the days of manual typewriters (yes, I used one at my first internship in Buffalo 30 years ago), I certainly see the value in social media as a journalistic tool.
    (Check out this story from your former employer, in fact:
    http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/200... )

    But my concerns stem from seeing people who approach it with fewer concerns about context and verification than you do. Someone I know and respect a lot (a professor at another j-school, in fact) a few months ago wrote on his blog "pretty soon everything I need to know will come from Twitter." Well, as an academic and a former journalist I'm sure he also "gets it" with regard to context and verifiability. But take that approach and spread it across the entire audience landscape, and it means a lot of people believing something just because they saw it on their computer or phone screen, which I find scary.

    So keep on trying to teach people (through your blog and other means) about the importance of context and applying standards of verification to what we read. That's the new media literacy we all need to understand.
  • ckanal
    Hi Jack,

    Thanks again for the feedback. I do agree with you on these main points.

    As for your hypothetical, Twitter can only go so far. Using the standards above, I'd first check if I can find any other tweets saying something similar to try to piece together some background. If not, I'd look into the person who tweeted that and try to found out more about him/her. If I could get a name, the search would be on to find additional info like a phone number.

    Basically, the search would probably continue off Twitter in that situation. Would every journalist do that? What would a member of the general public do, RT it and lead to it being a rumor? I can't answer those but I agree with you about the importance of education.
  • Wie sich ein Tweet verifizieren lässt
  • ckanal
    Thanks for the retweet!
  • very helpful tips
  • ckanal
    I'm very glad, thanks for the comment Shiva.
  • I like to follow verified tweeters so I started an A to Z list of verified a/cs of celebs/sportstars etc. @ http://twitter-verify.blogspot.com.
    Hope this help saves time from the fakes out there !
  • Three weeks after my last comment about verified accounts, my list has now grown past 550 with mixture of sportstars & celebs. So I've moved it to Wordpress with a better layout. Check out .. http://veritwitter.wordpress.com.
  • ckanal
    Excellent, Steve. Thank you. I've been sharing your site with others. It's a great idea and fantastic resource.
  • Name
    Good tips
  • ckanal
    Thanks.
  • This is a very sound plan of action.
    Thanks for the pointers.
  • ckanal
    Glad it's helpful.
  • Name
    Type your comment here.I am really sorry but what you've said under 3, 4, 5, and 6 is wrong and misleading. Firstly, twitter users write their own bio so they can put anything they like (being a CEO of a company where they are the only employee, director, manager and owner, all in one); secondly who's going to spend hours or days researching other people's bio. The number of tweets being a measure of credibility or authority is nonsense because many would argue to the contrary. Busy people don't have time to sit and tweet every day of the week. So, with due respect for trying to 'help' people learn how to verify a tweet your advice is nothing but a lame attempt to appear knowledgable, adding one more publication to your portfolio. But, sometimes it's better not to post anything than to post something just for the sake of it.
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