DW Germany monitors Social Networks content

DW experts have joined an international research group and started a three-year “Innovation Action” to detect fake user-generated videos (UGV) and eliminate them from news reports. The project is partly funded by the European Union.

The InVID initiative (In Video Veritas – Verification of Social Media Video Content for the News Industry) will create a platform providing services to identify news-relevant videos on social networks, to verify the content and to clarify usage rights.

UGV can be extremely valuable for news services, as they often provide the very first images of a dramatic event or a crisis area. However, they can irrevocably destroy the reputation of a news service if they prove to be manipulated or falsified. Within media organizations, attempts to verify UGV content consume a large amount of resources.

InVID aims to automate most of these steps to speed up and facilitate the process for professional journalists. On the future platform, topics that represent breaking news on social media will be identified. Videos being uploaded and shared about these topics on social networks will then be found, indexed, temporally fragmented and annotated based on their content. Based on the annotations and metadata, which include information about the user, location and time of recording, it will be possible to carry out an initial ranking of the videos. The subsequent verification process will focus on videos that are likely to be relevant and reliable.