The very nature of social media means it is often a source of real time, breaking news. As we've often seen, however, the very nature of social media also means that news sometimes isn't terribly accurate. Fortunately, Facebook aims to solve those inaccuracies thanks to a new partnership with Storyful.
Together, the two companies are creating a Newswire for the social network built around Storyful's verification technology. So, what exactly is Storyful?
The company describes itself as the first news agency of the social media age. Their service attempts to find the source of a story and determine if it's accurate based on a multitude of metrics. Such factors include whether or not the source's account is registered near where the news occurred, how long a particular account has existed, if a source has falsified content in the past or been citable by reputable outlets and so on.
Examples of recent usage of Storyful include helping to verify a picture of a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier firing shots at alleged terrorists, images of an underwater robot searching the recent South Korean ferry accident site and a picture of Turkish troops entering Syria.
As TechCrunch highlights, all of these images were produced by locals and could have easily been faked. But based on Storyful's technology, news outlets could report them as credible with confidence.
It's technology that, up to this point, has only been available to paying members of the press. But with Newswire, it's now available to pretty much everyone through Facebook.