VerifyThis
A Social Journalism Practicum Project
My name is Kerem Inal and for the past year and a half, I have been studying Social Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Unlike traditional journalism, where keeping a safe distance from issues was key, social journalists work with communities from the bottom up, helping them fix their information gaps.
During my program, I have been working on ways to create a community of people who are interested in misinformation but do not trust the current fact-checker media organizations. By creating a way to involve more people in fact-checking and addressing the information gaps I hope to increase trust in fact-checking.
I am also devoted to trying to understand and develop the “post-truth” era of journalism, where fake news and hoaxes are debated and are much more likely to engage the reader.
The Social Journalism program allows students to pick their own community. The boundaries are very broad, it can be anything from an online hacker community to people affected by climate change. This allows the students to pick the group of people they are interested in and passionate about. At the end of the program, we are tasked to create a practicum project about our chosen communities.
During my summer internship, I was fortunate enough to work at a fact-checking organization based in Turkey called Teyit. There I honed my fact-checking skills. I learned to write reports and find misinformation using online tools like TweetDeck and CrowdTangle where searching for online posts can be done in a larger context. During my time there I noticed a disconnect between the critics of the organization and the journalists. There was no line of conversation between the two, other than individual rants on twitter. Critics on Twitter or Facebook are rarely answered by the organization, however direct messages had a higher response rate when I was interning there.
When I came back to my third and final semester at CUNY, with the help of Carrie Brown, and Rachel Glickhouse, I decided to change my practicum community to focus on misinformation. Before tackling misinformation, I was trying to understand and connect with the hacker community. I was going to their meetings, understanding what their issues were, and how the community would benefit from a journalist. However, I was unable to create a solid connection with the community, thus changing was a great option for me.
After the switch, the first couple of weeks I started doing the exact opposite of what we had learned. The social journalism program taught us to start from the ground up and create solutions based on feedback and collaboration from our respective communities. I was in a rush to get my graduation project out, while many of my fellow classmates were already at the stage where they were creating websites and going to their respective community events left and right.
I was stuck at home, trying to figure out what I was doing with my time, and why I chose to change my community this late in the program. After about 2 weeks of thinking, procrastinating and some reading, I decided I had all the answers! I knew what people needed. I decided that I understood everyone’s problems, and I was determined to fix them. I came up with about 5 separate solutions, all under the same roof. Without much consultation with my community, I went with it.
My idea was to create a website, where I would gather information from a Twitter hashtag I would create and distribute, in hopes of getting people engaged with fact-checking.
Wait, but that’s not all! I also planned to then get people to come to my website, discuss fact-checking issues they see online, and help fact-checkers by showing them the facts they had found.
So, yeah, it is easy to say that the first couple of weeks did not go as planned. I slowly realized I was on the wrong track and started from scratch.
I went back to the methods I had used in the past: Ethnographic research. It sounds simple and basic, but it is not done in journalism. Yes, sources are researched, and journalists have a great understanding of the event or issue they are covering, but this was deeper than that. I started reading studies about misinformation. What media bubbles are, and how conservatives interact with media. This gave me an additional lens to look through at my future project.
According to research done by the Pew Research Center, 70% of republican adults believe that fact-checkers favor one side in their articles. Fact-checking is one of the solutions that has been put forward by journalists to combat misinformation. If a large majority of people have issues with the solution at hand, something needs to be done.
Another study done by Pew Research Center shows that Republican voters are more likely to blame journalists to be the cause of creating made-up news. 58% of Republicans would blame journalists, while 20% of Democrats say the same thing. These numbers got me thinking about what we could do to get more people involved in the fact-checking prosses, to get more people to trust journalists and the work they do. Only then could we talk about creating a solution for the spread of misinformation.
After reading many articles, I continued to use netnography as my methodology. Netnography is a method designed to do an online investigation, it is a way of doing qualitative research, ethnography, online.
To do this I needed to get a sense of the people I was aiming to work with. I started by doing a general assessment, I tried to answer simple questions like: Who online is talking about fact-checking issues? Where online is this conversation happening? Is there a back and forth conversation or is it a one-person rant? How does this person identify themselves, and what is their online presence? I created a small database of people I was able to find online and wrote down comments I had on them. While doing this I noticed patterns of similarities between people I found in forums and used this data to assemble a persona of the people I wanted to work with. I used Crowtangle, Facebook, Twitter, and TweetDeck to find people of interest.
This database allowed me to create a ‘persona’ of the people against fact-checking organizations. A persona is a research methodology used to create a fictional character that might be interested in a brand, product or site. This allows researchers to personify the data at hand to better explain the results of the research.
My persona was simple: A republican leaning person, interested in fact-checking and fact-checkers, active on online political forums, eager to talk about their own views on politics, and finally interested in finding out the truth themselves.
After doing my initial research, I saw I needed to collect more information. I continued with my netnography and started observing. I found online forums where many users conversed on political issues, Trump and occasionally fact-checking. Reddit groups such as r/askaconservative or a pro-Trump forum called TheDonald.win were some of the places that I went to understand how people conversed, what they talked about, what phrases they used and what kind of interaction they were getting on fact-checking issues.
All this research pointed me towards a gap between people against fact-checkers and the fact-checkers themselves. There was no interaction happening, at least in the parts of the internet I was checking. And yet these people had something to say, they were expressing their distrust in fact-checkers and their organizations. However, there was no one on the other end listening. This was my community, a group of people who dis-trust fact-checkers.
“I do my own research, instead of looking for a website to tell me what to believe.” Said a user while talking about why the distrust in fact-checkers exists. My community is well versed in online research and fact-finding of their own. They use various sources, some I would call credible, and others not. But the fact that the main reason my community did not find fact-checking important or trustworthy is that they were doing their own research and finding discrepancies with their own findings yet had never talked to a journalist about this.
After finishing my observational study, I decided to continue by doing participant observation. I went and tried to answer some of the questions people had, I asked some of my own questions and had conversations with many people on numerous forums. I was able to get people interested in talking to journalists, and I also was able to show that some journalists don’t just want quotes but would love to have a lengthy conversation. We did not see eye-to-eye on many issues; however, we were still able to look past the issues we had, and we were able to have civil conversations.
Finally, these discussions are what lead to my project evolving and turning into something a community of people told me that they would be interested in, and that was all I needed.
My idea took many turns along the way, but it became an actual project towards the end of the semester, where I was able to confidently and proudly call it the VerifyThis project.
What is VerifyThis?
VerifyThis aims to create conversation based on fact-checked articles, in hopes to connect journalists in the field, with readers who distrust their work. As I have explained to my community during many of my conversations, I in no way want to force anyone to believe something they truly disagree with, nor do I have any expectations to change these ideas. This project is to allow conversation, it is to humanize both sides, and create a safe space where people from various opinions can come and tell us what their truths are.
During many of my chats with community members, I noticed that people were more interested in talking about the organizations that do fact-checking, rather than talk about the fact itself. Not many had negative thoughts on specific articles written by the said organizations. Their articles were rarely read, and if they were it was always to prove a point. With the help of the community, I decided there should be a way to encourage people to read the articles, while still allowing discussion.
Research done in 2016 by Professors Jason Reifler and Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University shows the effectiveness of fact-checking articles. It shows that the people who read the articles are better at answering factual questions. This was an important metric for my project, since my community is known for not reading the articles, due to bias concerns. Creating an environment that focuses on reading the article, according to the study, would increase the awareness of facts that readers have.
I launched the project on my own website, Verifythis.link/VT, to encourage people to talk about specific parts of fact-checked articles. The website allows readers to come in and annotate the words and sentences of the articles. This lets people converse on a specific section, hoping to generate macro conversations rather than having discussions about the organization itself.
The feedback for this project was overwhelmingly positive. I got over 10 comments from separate people saying that they enjoyed the website, and liked the project. From the hundreds of comments, I answered 4 of the people went in to annotate a part of the article. They were all aware that it was a prototype, also saying this in their comments about the website design.
However, the people I talked to said they would be interested in exchanging ideas on this type of website if it would be easily available. They found it interesting to be able to comment on parts of the article, and then continue discussing the issue by creating comment thread. Additionally, many people said the main issue they see is the conversation getting out of hand, and they think that a moderation process is needed for this to work. During my journey I posted on more than 10 forums, getting more than 100 responses. As I mentioned above, 4 people who had just then met me online, were interested enough to test out my website. I think that is one of the most important metrics I can provide!
During my talks with the community, I was able to converse with a lot of people from various backgrounds. Many came into the conversation by cursing out journalists and what I stood for. I was able to look past all of that, I wasn't interested in what they thought about journalists and myself, I was interested in hearing their opinions on fact-checking. This mentality allowed me to have civil conversations with people who did not want to do anything with me. Many of the people I had talked to had never talked to a journalist before but yet were angry at them. After conversations, I had many people calm their tone and continue with the conversation. About two of the people I had connected with, came back to apologize for their comments at the beginning and said that they liked what I was doing, and how I was doing it.
I learned a lot from my practicum, not only about journalism but about research techniques and about learning from my mistakes. The journalism we learned for the past year and a half, opened me to a new way of thinking. Going out, making connections as a journalist and coming back to create a solution or a way that the community can benefit from our work is what I think has been missing from not only journalism but Anthropology, acting on the issues we see, rather than excepting other to act on our findings, in my opinion, is the way journalism and Anthropology should be done.
Through this project, I also was able to see the strength of being transparent. Many of my conversations were with people who did not like or trust journalists. This was a tricky area to work with, but I found transparency to be key. I was able to give all my information, openly tell them my goals and ambitions. I found all this interaction allowed me to connect with people in a way that they have not seen before, journalists talking in length with them, agreeing on some issues, and genuinely interested in their thoughts and opinions rather than coming in to grab a quote.
My Social Journalism journey taught me to do journalism in a new way, by engaging, connecting, and creating a solution for the public. However, maybe my most important lesson was that we must welcome conversations with critics, people who do not trust or believe in the work we do. The internet has many people who are just there to hit and run, to trash talk, and be out of there. However, the same could be said for the opposite. There are many people who want to voice their concerns, who are genuinely interested in our work but have their own views on why to not trust it. We need to engage, talk and try to connect with all people, not only to expand the readership but to be able to say “I have done all I can to connect with as many people as I could.”
Conversation, listening, and engaging is the key!