Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online

By the end of this talk, there will be 864 more hours of video on YouTube and 2.5 million more photos on Facebook and Instagram. So how do we sort through the deluge? At the TEDSalon in London, Markham Nolan shares the investigative techniques he and his team use to verify information in real-time, to let you know if that Statue of Liberty image has been doctored or if that video leaked from Syria is legitimate.

The managing editor of Storyful.com, Markham Nolan has watched journalism evolve from the pursuit of finding facts to the act of verifying those floating in the ether.

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM

Markham calls himself a “literary mercenary.” His main responsibility is to sift through news and information to see what’s true and what’s not. In the era of the ubiquitous and immediate cell phone photo, Twitter message and YouTube video, how do we verify and validate a piece of information arriving, say, from a region at war or one going through a natural disaster? As the managing editor of Storyful, that’s a question he has to answer daily.

“Their mission is to ‘pull the news from the noise.’ They have built up reliable communities in a range of countries, so that when news breaks, they have contacts they can call on to help verify locally-originated social media content.”  Currybet.com