I Pledge Allegiance to the Truth

According to the "Journalism Project," the first principle of journalism is its primary obligation to the truth.  With today's social media society, most citizens are journalists in their own way.  But, we all know that not everything that people post is true- we've all heard the saying, "you can't believe everything you read on the Internet."

For example, take Jimmy Kemmel's wolf prank.  He caught a video of a wolf roaming a random hallway, and got an American olympian, Kate Hansen, to tweet the video, as if an actual wolf was roaming the halls of the olympic village.  It only took the video a few minutes to go viral and capture the attention of news organizations, who shared the bizarre spotting.  It was a hilarious prank and extremely effective in sparking talk amongst social media users about the conditions in Sochi's olympic village.

Although I wasn't surprised about the gullibility of the social media world, it was interesting to see well-established news and journalism organizations fall for the prank.  And quite frankly, it's a little frightening.  It made me think of the potential fallibility in our everyday news.

While obviously this example caused little to no harm, there are situations where erroneous news has more serious implications for those who believe it.  As an example, one could cite the media behind the current condition of Venezuela.

Social media has allowed the anti-government protests to reach individuals all around the globe, causing an uprise of support for the protestors.  Disturbing images of violence have been released by independent individuals, paired with trending hashtags like "#prayforvenezuela."  These images are powerful and need to be shared with the world, but a considerable number of the most popular images have been proven to be fake.

This stirring image of a man hopelessly surrendering to police forces has caught fire in the Venezuela social media campaign, but it was actually taken in Brazil in 2013.  While the unrest in Venezuela is undeniably alarming, fraudulent photos may be exaggerating the conditions.  It also causes an onlooker to question whether or not those who share these images are doing so as a justification for their violence.  

So, the question is:  How do we distinguish truth from lies?  

It's going to be a tough task on our own, but thanks to a new system, called "Pheme," we may receive some help.  Pheme is basically a lie detector, tailored for social media platforms.  It's features include scanning posts and rating them on a scale of accuracy. Five universities are teaming up to work on developing the system, and it is projected to be finalized in a year and a half.  

I'm sure that the system will have its flaws in detecting the lies behind some news releases, but I think, overall, it will help in promoting truth in journalism.  It may not be able to invalidate Kate Hansen's tweet, because it came from her personal account, but it would easily discredit the fake photos used to support the Venezuelan rebellions, because the images can be traced back to previous events or times.

Just as we have to filter things we hear from others before we believe them, we need to filter the things we read before we believe them- or maybe just make Pheme do it for us.