Comments on: “So you say… and who are you, anyway?”: User needs for trust in social media http://bayarea2011.thatcamp.org/10/21/so-you-say-and-who-are-you-anyway-user-needs-for-trust-in-social-media/ The Humanities and Technology Camp Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:33:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.12 By: dan turner http://bayarea2011.thatcamp.org/10/21/so-you-say-and-who-are-you-anyway-user-needs-for-trust-in-social-media/#comment-231 Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:19:40 +0000 http://bayarea2011.thatcamp.org/?p=326#comment-231 Thanks, Carol (and I’d love to hear about your experiences coming to journalism, and what you’ve thought about it).

I’d like to propose this as a discussion, as I’m just learning myself some of the details of how a few people are also starting to look at this.

You raise good questions! It seems there are economic motivators (news organizations measure success in certain ways, which get plumped by “first hit” breaking news), system motivators (the low barrier to seeing a single report through social media and the web in general, the high barrier in confirming it), social science hurdles (balancing anonymity/pseudonymity concerns against reputation/trust), and things I’m sure I’m blanking on at the moment. Most, if not all, of these were problematic before the internets, but some are now worse.

I’d like to keep focus on 1) the use cases of of journalists w/r/t social media (breaking events? surfacing trends? cultivating individual sources? crowdsourcing?), b) their user needs towards verification (what raises confidence, what lowers it), iii) what can be designed into a system that is either automated or leverages humans to help raise confidence as defined in b).

]]> By: cziogas http://bayarea2011.thatcamp.org/10/21/so-you-say-and-who-are-you-anyway-user-needs-for-trust-in-social-media/#comment-230 Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:29:52 +0000 http://bayarea2011.thatcamp.org/?p=326#comment-230 Dan, will you be leading a talk on this? As a fairly new journalist (2 years), I find this topic very interesting and would like to explore it further. I was not trained to do old school journalism, but was raised reading it. I feel that instant reporting–i.e. using social media to spread the news as quickly as possible–has often resulted in sloppy and inaccurate reporting that isn’t of much benefit. But what can we do when everyone thinks they can write/report/spread information without bothering to do a background check on the strands of information they’ve picked up?

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