Ted Talk

They were known.So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove.And that was the job of the journalist.

(Shouting)And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through,is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truckand thrown off a bridge.The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhoodand they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodiesoff the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language,and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were,and whether or not they were what the video said it was.

That's what that tells me.And also, as you look away from the bridge,there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank,and the river narrows.

So we set about going to work on this video, andthe only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account.There was only one video posted to that account,and the username was Rita Krill.And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name.But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so.The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills.So we looked all over the U.S.

And what that means is just constant,huge volumes of data going up.It's actually staggering.

was done by an Italian academic.He's called André Pannison, and he basicallytook the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Squareon the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someoneretweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,but what you get

So we went back to the video,and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference.So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella,there's a white lilo in the pool,there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool,and there's two trees in the background.And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer,and sure enough, there's the white lilo,there are the two trees,there's the umbrella.

Sometimes the search for truth, though,is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences.Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviouslya lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can bepotentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTubeactually becomes the most important repositoryof information about what's going on in the world.

And finding the source becomes more and more important --finding the good source -- and Twitter is where most journalists now go.It's like the de facto real-time newswire,if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter.

It's actually folded in this photo.Little bit of trickery.

And we zoom right in.We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge.And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video,and as we click through it, you can see someone'suploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy,so we click into the photos.

was done by an Italian academic.He's called André Pannison, and he basicallytook the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Squareon the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someoneretweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,but what you get

And what that means is just constant,huge volumes of data going up.It's actually staggering.

Although the webis running like a torrent, there's so much information therethat it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day,if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information.Given a couple of clues, I could probably find outa lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out.

So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing,because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds.This is from Hama.Video:

So what you had in Hurricane Sandy wasa superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time,hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- (Laughter) --and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before.And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes,so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted.We had to deal with composite imagesthat were merging photos from previous storms.We had to deal with images from films like "The Day After Tomorrow."

So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist,but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side.It's on the input side.

It's somewhere else.And the third one said, "I think the bridge does exist,but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed,so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense."So that was the only one that gave us a clue.We looked through the video for other clues.We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use.We looked at the curbs.

We're not in a positionwhere the audience is reacting to news.We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them.They're helping us find the news.

Now in the deluge of information, this is wherethe real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself,because we have more tools than everto do that kind of investigation.And when you start digging into the sources, you can gofurther and further than you ever could before.

And what that means is just constant,huge volumes of data going up.It's actually staggering.

Sometimes you come across a piece of content thatis so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it,but you're not 100 percent sure if you can becauseyou don't know if the source is credible.You don't know if it's a scrape.

Sometimes you come across a piece of content thatis so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it,but you're not 100 percent sure if you can becauseyou don't know if the source is credible.You don't know if it's a scrape.

Although the webis running like a torrent, there's so much information therethat it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day,if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information.Given a couple of clues, I could probably find outa lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out.

You don't know if it's a re-upload.And you have to do that investigative work.And this video, which I'm going to let run through,was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago.

was done by an Italian academic.He's called André Pannison, and he basicallytook the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Squareon the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someoneretweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,but what you get is hints

But what it tells me is that, at a time whenthere's more -- there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been,it's harder to filter, we have greater tools.We have free Internet tools that allow us,help us do this kind of investigation.We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before,and computers that are quicker than ever before.

the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someoneretweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,but what you get is hints at who is more interestingand who is worth investigating.And as the conversation grew and grew, it becamemore and more lively

It's concern withhow we get information and how we gather the news.And that's changed, because we've had a huge shiftin the balance of power fromthe news organizations to the audience.And the audience for such a long time was in a positionwhere they didn't have any way of affecting newsor making any change.

It was from Avenue Cin downtown Manhattan, which was flooded.And the reason that they could tell that it was realwas because they could get to the source, and in this case,these guys were New York food bloggers.They were well respected.

And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool.So we were able to call Rita, clear the video,make sure that it had been shot, and then our clientswere delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.

It's happeningon a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.

The curbs were throwing shadows south,so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river.It had black-and-white curbs.As we looked at the river itself, you could see there'sa concrete stone on the west side.

And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool.So we were able to call Rita, clear the video,make sure that it had been shot, and then our clientswere delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.

Truth is a value.Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human.No matter how quick we get with computers, no matterhow much information we have, you'll never be ableto remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise,because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait.Thanks very much.

But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagramwhich was subjected to a grilling by journalists.They weren't really sure.

They were known.So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove.And that was the job of the journalist.

Sometimes you come across a piece of content thatis so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it,but you're not 100 percent sure if you can becauseyou don't know if the source is credible.You don't know if it's a scrape.

André Pannison, and he basicallytook the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Squareon the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign,and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someoneretweets a message, a connection is made between two dots,and the more times that message is retweeted by other people,the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made.And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation,but what you get is hints at who is more interestingand who is worth