Researchers Develop a Wikipedia of Fact-Checking During Natural Disasters

University of Southampton (United Kingdom)

Social media is often flooded with information in the wake of natural disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis, but much of that information is contradictory and it can be difficult or impossible to sort the accurate from the inaccurate.

Researchers at the University of Southampton, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and Qatar Computing Research Institute are hoping to address this shortcoming with Verily, an online platform for crowd-sourcing the veracity of information posted to social media.

To test the platform’s ability to rapidly verify information, researchers set up the Verily Challenge. Questions, such as whether a picture had been taken in a certain city, were posted to Verily’s website and users were asked to answer the question and justify their answer with an explanation, picture, or video. A user could not simply submit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for an answer. Instead, they had to verify their position by providing evidence either in the form of an image or video or as text.

For example, this photo of a street was posted with the question: Is this street in Rome. The photo was taken from a personal archive and was actually in the Italian town of Caltagirone in Sicily. The question was answered correctly within four hours by a user who submitted another picture of the same street.

Researchers found users were able to very rapidly verify or falsify the information on Verily through various means, including personal memory, Web searches, and online tools such as Google Earth. Researchers say their next step will be to deploy Verily to collect and verify evidence during an actual humanitarian disaster.

Victor Naroditskiy, a research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University, who helped to create Verily, says: “The lack of verifiability of content posted on social media is the main reason preventing humanitarian and news organisations from making a wider use of it.

“The rationale for Verily is that the collective effort of people searching for the truth will be fruitful. Examples of the tremendous power of collective effort can be seen in projects like Wikipedia, and closer to home in experiments like the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge. In this 2009 challenge, 10 red weather balloons moored at secret locations throughout the US were discovered within nine hours through a mass mobilisation over social media channels.”  Report