Last week I was contacted by Jessica Maher, a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, for an interview. The reporter from this well-known newspaper read a comment that I made in an alleged early picture from the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti. The picture was posted in Twitpic and shared in Twitter. Many people thought it was the first picture from the earthquake, but I thought that it was too early to see high resolution pictures from the earthquake. I remembered about TinEye, a reverse image search engine that is used by Digg to identify duplicate submissions in their website. TinEye is now open to anyone, so people can just upload an image (or specify it’s web address) and look for similar pictures. I noticed that there were nine duplicates from that specific picture, the original one being posted in National Geographic. It wasn’t from Haiti, but from an earthquake that occurred in Japan in 2004. It was then when I warned via Twitter and a comment in Twitpic that the picture was fake.

Jessica wanted to know my perspective about people posting fake pictures, or news, using Twitter, and how that affects this whole “citizen journalism” power that social networks are giving to us. Here is the article, where Jessica included part of my interview, but below is the whole transcript of it. I invite you to read it and comment about the topic.

Me: I thought it was too early to see hi-hes pictures being posted about the earthquake. It was like twenty minutes to half an hour after the event that I noticed about the picture. I first saw it in www.picfog.com, a real-time image searcher that uses Twitter trends to show you the last pictures posted about those topics. Then I used www.tineye.com, a reverse image search engine that let the users search for similar images, to check the picture’s integrity. I noticed that the picture was fake when I saw that there were nine other pictures posted in different sites, the original one in the National Geographic website.

Me: I don’t have the reference here but there were some of them, not that many as I thought. That one was the one being propagated more intensively. Even in the local news, here in Puerto Rico, one of the major news program showed that picture as if it were from the earthquake, FIVE hours after the disaster, in live television.

Me: In my opinion, it is all about getting attention. In this case, attention would be being retweeted a couple of times and getting more followers. Other than that I don’t see any other reason on why to do this. Spammers could take advantage of this too. Being retweeted adds credibility to their twitter account and could confuse SPAM detectors.

Me: Yes. Here in Puerto Rico we used twitter last year as an alerts/news propagation channel in an emergency. I made an analysis and wrote an article (it’s in spanish but I think that you could understand something by traducing it in Google Translate) about how we used this powerful tool to propagate information during a crisis. You can read the article here: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://miguelrios.org/twitter-durante-la-emergencia-analisis-de-la-explosion-en-la-refineria-gulf/&sl=es&tl=en ). A petroleum facility exploded, the explosion was felt in the entire Puerto Rican metro area. Everyone was scared. Traditional news channels as radio and TV didn’t cover ANYTHING until TWO hours later because the explosion was at midnight. We in twitter propagated all the news about the incident very fast, and cleared rumors by using internet tools as flight tracking systems (one of the rumor was that a commercial airplane had crashed in the refinery). That day I learned that Twitter could be used as a powerful tool during emergencies.

Answering your question; by abusing of the power Twitter gives to citizens to report and propagate information, we return to the model in which news have to be confirmed by a respected or trusted entity before being believed/propagated. That process adds a lot of time of waiting before adding credibility to an image, or even worse to a tsunami warning or other event that can be avoided or mitigated. That lapse of time could be crucial to save lives.

Me: I don’t think there are many people posting fake pictures, but the real problem is how retweets of those small quantity of fake pictures are propagating them. Sometimes people retweet them even before opening the picture hyperlink. So even when there is a small quantity of people posting fake pictures about the earthquake, there are lots of people retweeting them, which hurts the same to citizen journalism than posting them.