You’re browsing social media and you see something that doesn’t look right. What do you do? You can search for information about the source or the material itself but you may not find the answer. What if there was a technology-based solution that could help – some kind of signal that would reassure you that what you’re seeing hasn’t been tampered with or misdirected?

This question has been posed by many organisations and individuals in the last couple of years as the scourge of disinformation has grown. Now Project Origin, a collaboration involving the BBC, the CBC/Radio Canada, Microsoft and The New York Times is working on a solution.

Essentially, we are seeking to repair the link in news provenance that has been broken by large-scale third-party content hosting. What do we mean by broken provenance? Most large social media platforms have features such as verified pages or s but outside of these, there are countless re-posts of content that was originally published by another person or organisation. In some cases, this content is simply re-ed and shared. In others, a re- is accompanied by some new context. s also modify the content - for humour, for brevity, and in some cases, with malicious intent.

Our objective is to derive signals with respect to content coming from publishers or originators to allow consumers to be reassured about its source and the fact that it has not been manipulated. It’s a huge task and we’re very much aware that others are doing excellent work in this space, as well as in the wider disinformation sphere. The Content Authenticity Initiative, for example, has carried out some excellent work, focusing, in the first instance, on securing the provenance of images from the point of capture.

We’ve divided the problem into three main areas - giving the content item an identifier, finding a way to allow it to take that identifier with it on its journey and safely storing the information that will allow it to be checked.

Firstly, each digital image, video or audio file is represented by a very specific sequence of bits, so specific that we can safely identify even the smallest differences from the content that was originally produced. These sequences of bits are, understandably, enormous, but thankfully, we can lean on a concept called cryptographic hashing as a way of allowing us to represent them as a short string through secure hash algorithms. We can be confident that there is effectively a zero probability that two pieces of content share the same hash.

To know who generated the content hash, we need another tool – a key. Public-private asymmetric keys are in common use on today’s internet – helping us carry out e-commerce amongst other things. They allow a publisher to digitally sign a document which is linked to a piece of content – containing for example data about the content and the hashes that represent it - by creating something we call a manifest. Again, maths is our hero here with some complex cryptography ensuring that only the person with the private key could have signed the manifest and this can be verified using the corresponding public key.

The way a browser on a PC knows that this signature is bona fide is via a piece of standard internet functionality provided by a Certificate Authority – a trusted third party that checks the public key it’s being offered belongs to the right party.

Finally, at the heart of a provenance system we need a way of maintaining a reliable and consistent database of manifests. For Origin we plan to use the Microsoft Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) as the heart of the manifest and receipt storage. The Provenance System built around this to deal with the various media registration and queries will be based on Microsoft’s AMP (Aether Media Provenance)

Unlike the permissionless blockchain solutions made famous by cryptocurrency, CCF is a ‘permissioned’ system. These are sometimes called ‘green blockchains’ since they do not need to consume large amounts of energy to determine consensus – there is enough trust between parties controlling the system to allow the nodes to act on a much simpler basis.

To sum up, we are developing a machine-readable way of representing data about a content item in a way that allows a publisher to tie or ‘bind’ the specific content item to the data and have it stored safely for future retrieval by a .

So what’s next? On the technology front we’re determining how to ensure that the content, its manifest and the cryptographic binding – the signed hashes and certificates that link the content you have to the details - are all conveyed together. We're also working on what to do when data is not present or has been altered. What happens for example if content has been clipped or transcoded in a useful and legitimate way?

We’re also keen to determine how this kind of technology can help in a wider media and technology community where there are many tools operated by a range of different organisations. An important element of our work has been trying to understand the APIs or common interfaces that might be standardised so a single device can discover and query different systems - including those used for content creation. And we’re launching a formal standards effort to define APIs and systems specifications for media provenance across the whole media ecosystem.

As we live through the Covid-19 crisis and assess the significant changes it has brought, there’s a growing view that we may want to make some of these more permanent. Technology has been at the heart of our response with media and technology companies quickly drawing on deep reserves of innovation and ingenuity to the biggest and most sudden societal upheaval in a generation. From tracking the virus to helping to keep us well and happy, responses have been wide-ranging and varied.

Whilst we know this can never be an exhaustive process, we are tracking some of these and logging them over the course of the crisis and musing on what we might learn and take on into the era post lockdown. We’ve looked at this under the BBC’s three tenets of informing, educating and entertaining, and while we’re aware of the significant amount of work being done inside the corporation we've focused mainly on what we’ve learned from outside.

In the information field we’ve seen social media companies and others make active attempts to remove Covid-19 misinformation or alert s to false claims. Facebook has used overlays to highlight fake news posts. Twitter has removed tweets from politicians and even world leaders while WhatsApp are limiting message spread to try to limit the dissemination of fake stories. NewsGuard and BT partnered with DCMS to raise awareness of a free tool to help the UK public identify fake news and learn about the dangers of COVID-19 misinformation. Other tech companies are reportedly working with the Cabinet Office counter-misinformation unit. Social media companies have also acted to boost trusted news & public health sources. Some have also made health advice and hyperlinks to the WHO or NHS prominent on the home screen or during advert breaks. New information tools are emerging such as thes WHO bot on WhatsApp and initiatives such as TikTok’s #SafeHands challenge. There’s been a focus on making information universally available – offering access to key services for free, for example. UK mobile networks agreed to offer ‘data free’ access to the NHS website. And with news organisations suffering because of a loss of advertising revenue, Facebook announced $100m of via its journalism project.

In education, a vast array of online resources to help home-educators have been made available online, from fitness programmes to art instruction. services such as Carol Vorderman’s maths course have been offered for free. Microsoft’s streaming service Mixer added an education category and of course the BBC’s major Bitesize initiative has offered new resources as the lockdown continues into the new school term.

There’s been a veritable entertainment bonanza with theatres and other arts providers offering free access to a wide range of content. New media formats have hit the mainstream such as ITV’s virtual Grand National (with a cycling format to follow). Live streamed concerts, talk-shows, plays and gaming have taken off - some for charitable purposes- StreamAid on Twitch for example. To date, more than 38 million people have watched Andrea Bocelli’s free online Easter concert from Milan’s Duomo. To cope with the uptick in bandwidth needed, media companies have reduced streaming quality to reduce strain on networks (Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV). Community and conferencing apps like Houseparty and Zoom have also seen huge growth and been used imaginatively to create events such as virtual choral and orchestral performances.

Separately we looked at the response to mapping the crisis itself. Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir - as well as London-based Faculty AI – are working with Government to model the healthcare response to the pandemic and provide interactive dashboards for the NHS.  It is unclear to what extent UK mobile phone operators will supply anonymous location and usage data to the Government to create movement maps, reportedly with a 12- to 24-hour delay, to discover whether the public are abiding by lockdown rules (an initiative which ICO has approved). Google and Apple announced that they would partner to develop interoperable APIs to facilitate tracing via Bluetooth. Public Health authorities could then draw on this technology to release tracing apps: a NHS app is under development. Big questions remain er take-up and privacy (as well as the availability of necessary testing). Meanwhile, on a local level, a Covid-19 Tech Response (CTR) group was set up to co-ordinate the supply of technology talent. They’ve brought 400 volunteers together, many of them ing local Mutual Aid groups.

In of how the BBC might learn from the emerging initiatives – above and beyond the excellent work it’s doing with Bitesize and events such as the Big Night In we looked at:

Shared experiences - In isolation, more than ever, we’ve sought experiences which unite us from friendship group Zoom quizzes to remote family meals. Co-watching (finding ways to congregate around a particular TV experience, live or VOD at the same time) was a trend that the BBC's Blue Room team picked up at CES from one of the exhibitors Dabby. If we think this will be a behaviour that outlasts lockdown, should we develop co-watching/listening functionality as a way of boosting our mission of bringing the nation together?

Dialogues - The BBC has a long history in connecting communities - an excellent example being local radio phone–ins. We’ve often struggled to find the digital iteration of this with the demise of message boards, and comments on stories can feel thin and combative. Local communities are organising via Facebook or Whatsapp groups, but could we do more to be a digital forum for community dialogue to link up volunteers, offer information on local resources and host conversations? And should we explore machine learning solutions to help with the otherwise overwhelming moderation task?

Mental Health tools - Citing WHO guidance, our own mental health content has encouraged audiences to limit time spent reading or watching news on the pandemic, which can prompt anxiety and stress. The BBC news site and app are offering curations on ‘long reads’ or more uplifting personal stories, and other news providers are separating ‘in other news’ sections or offering Covid free newsletters. What might we do in response to this?

On the other side of the coin we looked at an area where we felt caution might be needed. Data has the potential to model, limit and help solve this crisis, and urgent new public/private partnerships are springing up. The BBC could play a role in this and longer term developments. We need to weigh the trade-offs: providing trusted resources for our audiences and pulling together in a moment of national crisis versus privacy & consent issues, and the risk of compromising audience trust and our independence. Our expertise with partnerships will be tested like never before but we have much to contribute from our research and experience with privacy-preserving technologies.

 “All around the world, fake news is now the poison in the bloodstream of our societies – destabilising democracy and undermining trust in institutions and the rule of law” - Speech by Tony Hall, Director-General of the BBC - Lord Speaker Lecture - Wednesday 20th March 2019.

Propaganda, deception, suppression of free speech, have all been enduring issues for every society, but in recent years like ‘fake news’ and disinformation have been heard in public discourse with alarming regularity. So, what is happening to make it a live issue for news organisations? Can anything be done to push back against the wave of disinformation? What type of interventions are needed? Can ML help tackle disinformation?”

The latest fireside chat was hosted by BBC Technologist Ahmed Razek. The line-up for the evening featured Sam Jeffers (Who Targets Me?), Dr. David Corney (Full Fact), Magda Piatkowska (Head of Data Solutions, BBC News), and Jon Lloyd (Mozilla Foundation).

Ahmed Razek kicked off by setting out First Draft News’s seven categories of misinformation.

The world of misinformation is complicated. Do people actually care about having real news that challenges them?

Sam Jeffers feared that we only think about disinformation a bit, not enough. Who Targets Me is trying to normalise people’s understanding. We see strange things from time to time that deserve explanation. There is a growing community of people being confronted with misinformation. There is a need to help people find trust signals to help them differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy content. If we can be more transparent, we can make more of the trustworthy content more trusted. Madga Piatkowska stressed the need for developing data solutions without hurting people. The intent behind publication and content is an important aspect. Satire is not true and “facts” are not always facts - not everything is intended to misinform.

Jon Lloyd, referring to his advocacy work at Mozilla, thought it is all too easy to fall into the trap of talking about fake news. Disinformation is affecting every aspect of our daily lives now. This is a sociological problem, spanning human rights, political and health arenas, and so on. Companies behind tech need to be looked at closely. The public is coming along with Mozilla on disinformation as a term. In the US, a recent survey showed that people are more concerned about disinformation than terrorism.

We are discussing how ML can tackle disinformation. Jon has advocated for one simple tech change - The Guardian’s data labelling feature.

Jon shared his relevant experience of proactive media action in the face of disinformation. The Guardian noticed a lot of traffic on a 2013 article quite suddenly (it was an old article). Traffic was coming from a Facebook group which was posting a lot of Islamophobic content. The Guardian knew that people were not paying attention to the date of the article so they tweaked the metadata to make the date immediately noticeable to the reader. Taking a human-centric approach to do what was in their power - to change what was happening. Lots of blame is reflected on the media for not doing enough. There are more sophisticated threats now, more authentic s spreading misinformation. We need more transparency on organic content (-generated content). It is necessary to work with researchers to set a baseline of what excellent looks like and to assess against that baseline. Jon encouraged Technologists to transparency efforts to get to excellent.

The nature of elections is changing. What do technologists and journalists need to prepare for going forward?

Sam thinks that we regulate tightly in the UK. Who Targets Me is interested in people being able to prove who they are, particularly if they are running large amounts of political advertising. Some special cases deserve anonymity but an individual, group or organisation should generally be able to stand behind what they put out. Do people really understand why they see a particular message or content, based on the data collected on them? Democracy is about debate and collective decision - we need to explain modern campaigning approaches and raise faith in how elections are run. Facebook doesn’t expose information about targeting - what data is used to reach particular people. Social media tools allow for the circumvention of conventional electoral practice.

Can the share some insight into the fact-checking process?

Magda shared observations of BBC News’ work with Reality Check journalists. BBC News has a role in transparency, in explaining to the audience what happens. Most people don't understand what targeting actually is. It is very important that we do explain. Sam maintains that Facebook is an interesting dilemma as they have done more than other platforms, but take multiple-times more money for this type of advertising. Google and YouTube transparency tools are polluted; they are not clear on how often they are updated and they are messy.  

David Corney shared useful insights into Full Fact’s fact-checking carried out by journalists - checking claims by influential people that may be misleading or easily misinterpreted by the audience. The fact-checking journalists publish a fact check; a piece summarising the full story after doing the research that the audience does not have time to do. A smaller communications team checks when these claims are being re-shared.

Newspapers are asked to publish corrections but regularly decline the invitation. Full Fact’s automated fact-checking team is a team of technologists working to the fact-checkers and the organisation’s communications team, using ML. Prototype software to do fact checks of full sentences is being developed and refined. Algorithms will find a series of data and check if a claim is true or false for more straightforward claims. Full Fact recently received Google funding to build a better claim detection system. Concrete claims will be stored, labelled and tagged. This will allow a wider range of media and free up fact-checkers.  The potential dangers of disinformation are making the BBC risk-averse, and in journalism, this is a problem as the speed of publication is important. Increasingly, it is not that we have a problem with the process, but that we have a problem with the competition.

Recent BBC News research suggested that, “In India, people are reluctant to share messages which they think might incite violence, but feel duty-bound to share nationalistic messages”. What does the global view of the impact of disinformation look like? What is the non-western perspective?

Magda said that different patterns and preferences are witnessed across the globe. Long journalistic tradition is not the case everywhere. Literacy challenges, accessibility to online content, and ability to scan and consume it are prevalent in certain regions. We must also consider the impact of government and propaganda in certain areas. Jon added that we could end up creating policies that are difficult to enforce on a global scale. Magda thought that we needed to pay attention to where the tech is going to grow, e.g. China, as data will impact the way in which disinformation will spread in those regions. Are scoring systems a viable tool to rate content? David felt that 20-30 years ago when content was primarily garnered from newspapers and TV news, editorial teams acted as gatekeepers. That role has been somewhat demolished by social media and citizen journalists who spread their stories. We need something to point us to the stories that are worth paying attention to. If the algorithm gets it wrong, automation will be damaging.

What role do algorithms have to play?

Ahmed moved the conversation along to the subject of recommendation algorithms. Sam pondered, “When it strikes you that you see a Facebook ad and you click through and then you are recommended other pages, how quickly can that send you in more radical directions than you were expecting - to some strong content?”.  Regarding recommendation engines built a while ago, we don’t really know where the ability lies. Do we understand people’s information diets?  People are consuming lots of stuff from a particular perspective and wonder how they got there. Magda argued that if you really rely on ML you have to take into that your algorithm learns from people’s behaviour. That behaviour is not always good for them; they sometimes have poor information diets. This is when we analyse what it means to be informed by editorial and policy strategy as well as tech.Start simple so recommenders are not too complicated, and so we can assess if we are hurting the audience. If you put more interesting content in front of people, they do engage. Take the audience and journalists on a journey.

David thought that algorithms have a tendency to go towards most extreme content. Algorithms do give us relevant recommendations but sometimes get it wrong. Recommendations systems can look to the authority of sources rather than recency. Jon reflected that ultimately we need transparency. Platforms say they are making tweaks and fixes that cannot be proven. We are supposed to take at face value these companies who have profit and expansion at their core. Sam agrees - if a business model is totally dependent on the algorithm, and platforms are optimising for engagement and the scale is huge, switching them off is a massive decision. Magda reminded us that this should be the responsibility on the supply side of the content also. 

In the UK, a recent report on misinformation by the Commons Select Committee suggested that a new category of tech company should be formulated, “which tightens tech companies’ liabilities, and which is not necessarily either a ‘platform’ or a ‘publisher’”.

There has to be a system, according to Magda. There is no one object of regulation - not platforms, or media, or government. It is the responsibility of the system. All parties have their part to play. Media has a role to educate. Sam restated Who Target Me’s interest in radical transparency around political advertising. There may need to be a product suite for solving all the different problems. Different tools are required to do different jobs, and a market created in tools to help you to understand.

A team of researchers at the Allen Institute of AI recently developed Grover, a neural network capable of generating fake news articles in the style of human journalists. They argue they are fighting fire with fire because the better Grover gets at generating fakes, the better it will get at detecting them.

The ability to generate text did not worry David, the problem is getting the content into a platform where people start believing it. The story is not a problem in itself. Madga argued that it depends on intent. Who is behind it, using for good or for bad?

There has been some hype around both deep fakes and shallow fakes. A recent example of the shallow fake was the slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi which made her appear to be disoriented. This video was subsequently retweeted by the President of the United States. There was no ML required here, this was basic video manipulation that has a profound effect.

Jon believed that a picture is worth a thousand words. Video even more so. Preparedness is better than panic. We should be more concerned about recommendation algorithms, methods of verification and systems to flag false content. To unfollow YouTube video is a long process. Changing policies is one thing. Responsible behaviour on the part of companies is not a zero-sum game. Sam thought that political video is shallow-fakey anyway. It’s telling a story via the use of selective information. David advocated that it is worth considering radical options like massive regulation. Magda thought trust will become such a big thing; the brand association with factual content. And she foresaw a decline of the not-so trusted-brands. Jon reflected upon transparency transformation in the food and fashion industry but also recognised that there is no silver bullet. It will require a coordinated effort offline as well as online, and not just tech. While financial incentive remains for companies, it won’t happen on its own. Sam added that we can use this tech to make good democratic strides forward also.

Huge thanks to Ahmed Razek and the for delivering another engaging fireside chat on a very hot topic. The conversation around fake news, misinformation and disinformation is multi-faceted. As the BBC, we need to keep reminding ourselves and others that the problem is not just about journalism. The impact of misinformation reaches far and wide and needs to be considered from societal, policy, tech, humanitarian and public trust perspectives. And so we, along with other organisations, are taking a deeper look at what is happening in these areas. There is lots of great ongoing work in BBC R&D, BBC News, and elsewhere in the organisation. The BBC provided into the Disinformation and “Fake News”: Final Report (February 2019). Director of the BBC World Service Group, Jamie Angus, subsequently confirmed that the World Service would take the lead in addressing the ‘Fake News’ threat making use of its 42 language services, knowledge on the ground and BBC Monitoring to spot harmful examples and expose emerging patterns. To echo Magda, we must progress in a way that is not harmful to our audience.

Social media as a source for news is in decline for the first time, according to an international poll which was revealed to the BBC this week. Most of the drop was due to a growing distrust in Facebook as a news platform.  Meanwhile people's trust in the news in general has stayed stable with just over half of people saying they trust the news they use themselves. 

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is an annual survey of digital news usage across the world, and this year it polled 74,000 people in 37 countries. 

It found that usage of Facebook as a source of news had dropped for the first time, most noticeably in the US (down 9%) but also most other countries including the UK (down 2% to 27%). 

Other trends that emerged were:

• 58% of those polled in the UK were concerned about fake news. This percentage is higher in other countries where there's a higher level of polarised opinion like Brazil (85%) with elections and Spain (69%) after the Catalan independence vote
• There's a higher proportion of people wanting government intervention to stop fake news in Europe (60%) than in the US (41%)
• Social platforms are least trusted in the UK of all countries surveyed (12%), with higher trust for "mainstream" media such as broadcast and quality newspapers
• More people are using messaging apps such as Whatsapp to share news, particularly in Malaysia (54%) and Brazil (48%) however the take-up in the UK is still relatively small (5%)
• There's a gradual increase in people paying for online news subscriptions - 16% up in the US, while for the UK it's 7%
• Podcasts are becoming more popular (18%), particularly among younger people
• The same is true for voice-activated speakers. Usage has doubled in the UK, with just under half using them to access news. 

You can find more details here. 

The World Cup is up and running and our online teams are in tournament mode as England enter the fray this evening with their opener against Tunisia live and exclusive across the BBC.

Major events like this on BBC Sport are always hugely popular with our audiences, and this year we’re offering more ways to follow the action than ever before.

We want to give people the best-possible World Cup experience and our online efforts focus on two main areas – enhancing our own BBC Sport digital service, including the website and apps, and engaging audiences via social media to raise awareness of our coverage and drive them to our digital and broadcast platforms.

We have some brilliant new features on our own service (alongside all the fan favourites we know people love) and some exciting tie-ins with social platforms, so I wanted to give an overview of all the key things here.

On the BBC 2t5w3g

Our live HD coverage is the main event and all 33 matches live on BBC TV are available to watch online through BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer, while people can also listen to Five Live Radio commentary from all games. We recently announced two exciting trials, giving people the chance to watch in Ultra HD and High Dynamic Range and even from the stands in Russia, through our new VR app, live for the first time.

Regular s will know that on match days our live pages kick in, featuring all the build-up, breaking news, live-text commentary and the best comments from fans across social media. These pages are at the centre of our coverage again, especially on mobile devices. We have made some big changes under-the-hood, including getting in-game goal clips published more quickly and rebuilding the live text stream to enhance its performance through better speed and reliability.

We have also refreshed our connected TV app to give greater prominence to live content, this makes it easy for viewers to watch the games live with alternative match commentary from Radio 5 Live and access alternative camera angles of the action, like the tactical camera view.

We have broadened the range of live video we can offer through a trial that makes it possible for our correspondents like Phil McNulty and David Ornstein to stream live directly from Russia into these live pages from their mobile phones for the first time. We hope it’ll help bring fans closer to the action on-the-ground, which is exactly what our live pages are designed to do.

And of course, we’ve got those who can’t watch live covered too. We have video highlights for every game and goal scored at the World Cup available at the final whistle through our BBC Sport products, with a daily catch-up offering also available across BBC iPlayer.

Personalisation has been a big focus for us over the last few years and, through the BBC Sport mobile app, people can set a wide range of alerts (including line-ups, kick-off, goals, half-time and full-time scores) for their favourite team… or for all 32 teams if they really want to. We also have image and video alerts for those not watching live, so they can see the key moments as soon as they happen right on their lock screen. And our focus on performance across mobile devices has seen us upgrade the ‘My Sport’ area of the app to make it load much faster.

We have three interactive features that have proven to be really popular, especially with younger audiences. The Team Selector lets people take control of the hot seat and show the likes of Southgate and Deschamps how it should be done. And our new Player Rater lets fans become pundits as they give their own ratings of player performance. The scale of the audience participating with these features is large enough that we can represent the nation’s view on the selections and ratings, providing great content and talking points across our online and broadcast services. While audiences can also take part in quizzes against the clock thanks to ‘Quizimodo’, our new in-house quiz engine.

We’ll also have exclusive audio content available through smart speakers for the first time too provided by Radio 5 Live, so listen out for this if you are chatting to Alexa or using your Apple HomePod device - just ask your speaker to ‘Take me to the World Cup’, or ask for the “Take me to the World Cup BBC podcast”.

Not only are these innovations going to be in action over the next month or so, but they enhance our day-to-day offer as we work to build on our position as the UK’s leading digital sport service and strengthen our engagement with younger audiences beyond the tournament.

Across social media 57227

BBC Sport’s social s provide a wide range of content for the World Cup, bringing the audience closer to the action, the personalities and the pundits. We also work with all the major platforms to make the most of their unique features, giving their s some exclusive content while helping drive people back to the BBC’s live matches and comprehensive online coverage.

Twitter will be where our in-match updates and breaking news are posted throughout the tournament, with the best video moments also available to watch on our s. And we will deliver broadcast clips into approximately 15-20 editions of Snapchat’s daily World Cup Stories to reach out to the younger teenagers who use that service.

On Facebook we’ll continue to deliver a mix of news stories, images and video to our followers, including a World Cup catch-up video at the end of each day. And our rapidly growing Match of the Day Instagram (@bbcmotd) will feature World Cup archive and 2018 action direct to our followers. We’ll also produce daily Instagram Stories featuring BBC pundits and presenters, including former England Women’s star, Alex Scott, alongside the best highlights from the day. And finally, our YouTube channel will show video highlights – putting our coverage to the front of Google for those s searching for the latest action.

Needless to say, we’re all really excited by England’s game tonight and are looking forward to delivering world-class coverage online as the tournament builds over the coming weeks. We hope audiences love it, and that even more people are encouraged to enjoy it across our digital and broadcast services because of our social media content.

Disruption and Deception - What Next for News? was the topic for a lively discussion at the Social Media and Broadcasting Conference hosted by the BBC Academy.  Hosted by Nic Newman from the Reuters Institute for Journalism with a of industry leads, the debate covered areas such as fake news, click bait, responsible product development, data control and personalisation. 

But of course much of the chat was about the Facebook news story.  Mark Little, CEO & co-founder of NevaLabs, sees this as a watershed moment. "Democracy is being weaponised. There's now an arms race and the forces of darkness are weaponising these social media tools. The good news is that now we're discussing these problems and working on solutions."  

 

There was much debate over the nature and impact of fake news.  Orit Kopel, co-founder of Wikitribune, said it was important to distinguish between deliberate falsehoods and bad journalism. "Misinformation is very rare," she said, born out by a show of hands of few people in the audience who'd recently seen fake news in their social media feeds,  "The main problem is bad journalism.  It's more profitable to have click bait headlines linking through to bad content."

There was also agreement that, overall, social media can be a force for good. BBC News social media editor Mark Frankel remains optimistic despite recent headlines: "It's not in our interest to lose Facebook.  Their recent algorithmic news feed changes could be a big opportunity. Ifi ti's about raising the bar, if it's about trust and respect, that can only be a good story for us."

Mark Little felt that while reforms and controls were needed, the benefits of social media were still enormous,  "Let's not lose the democratic potential of having media that's not owned by gatekeepers, but is instead in our own hands".

And what might be changing over the next couple of years?  Similar problems, just with different platforms, one list suggested. For Orit Kopel, the biggest changes would be around control: "We'll see people reclaiming their privacy and taking more control of their online lives".

You can see highlights of the Social Media and Broadcasting Conference on the BBC Academy website.  

 

This week's headlines about Facebook have further raised questions about the trustworthiness of social media.  According to one industry commentator we're heading towards an "Infocalypse".

Charlie Warzel, senior technology writer for Buzzfeed, will warn at a social media conference today hosted by the BBC Academy that advances in algorithms, combined with political manipulation, are creating a toxic cocktail where it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fake news.

"We have an online ecosystem of data that not only do many people not understand but even the companies in charge can't control."

"The problem is that there are these platforms that incentivise engagement over everything else. So if it draws your eyeballs, if it's scandalous, those platforms reward that.  On the other side is literacy too.  If you know that video can be manipulated in a certain way, you can look at things with a more sceptical eye."

And commenting on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal he pointed at the speed of growth of the platform as part of the problem.

"What we're looking at right now with Facebook is an enormous platform with billions of s. The issue is that it's grown so fast. These companies are working on the fly essentially and they're moving fast. Facebook's motto used to be 'move fast and break things' and its very clear that they've broken a lot of big things. Of course you could never anticipate that you would build a tool from your dorm room and it would influence geo-politics."

He sees this as a turning point in the public's safety awareness:

"One of the biggest things that can be done is on the side. Obviously there are tons of protections that need to come around governance and moderation. But on the end we can use this as a moment to say, what am I doing online? What am I giving up? We do this in the real world all the time. We're constantly assessing our safety and our security and we have to do this online too. I don't think that the battle for truth and reality is lost by any means but this vigilance is key."

And it could signal a culture shift for technologists:

"Let's learn from our past mistakes so that in creating the next big platforms, we don't have to go through these growing pains of being cavalier with data. It's incumbent upon you if you're building this technology to be able to explain what you plan to do with it and how you intend to safeguard it, because the only thing we truly know about innovation and technology is that a bunch of people are going to use it in unexpected ways."

Trust in Social Media was discussed at a event at the BBC Academy social media conference, which you can read here. 

BBC Archives has a remit to archive output with historical, cultural and production re-use value. Carl Davies is part of the Digital Archives Services team, and gives an insight into how such a broad range of online content is captured and saved in the archive.

In 2014 I posted a blog, and my colleague Elliot Gibson also wrote an article, detailing how BBC Archives were archiving and preserving the BBC’s web and social media output. With the vast changes to the website, innovations and new ways of the BBC interacting with audiences we felt it was a good time for an update.

Web Archiving 5v3b

The BBC tries to maintain and keep older pages online for the public to access for as a long as possible (dependant on technology, editorial or copyright reasons). It’s the BBC Archives responsibility to archive copies offline and preserve them. We archived the whole website in 2014, and as most of these pages are static, we don’t need to archive them all again, so we now have a targeted and selective approach each year focused on newly created pages.

In of capturing pages from bbc.co.uk for our web archive collections we currently have a 3 point approach:

1. WARC Web Crawling: This form of web archiving s and preserves the pages in the international standard of “WARC”. These WARC files can then be brought back to life on software, allowing s and researchers to view and interact with the website as if it were ‘live’ (clicking links and browsing). Web crawling captures a point in time, and currently we aim to do a high quality crawl of selected parts of the BBC website once a year.
2. PDF Web Crawling: In addition to the WARC files, we ensure each page captured also has a PDF, thus we are not solely bound by the WARC technology. That way we can also share PDFs for internal research. As it's a universal method of viewing documents, preservation is more straightforward in the future.
3. Screencasting: Lastly we look to take a screencast of some of our websites, especially when they have been redesigned, to capture the look & feel of the site in a video (a bit like a software tutorial or a computer game walkthrough you often find on YouTube). This consists of someone recording their screen while browsing a part of the BBC Website, and this walkthrough is then archived alongside our other AV archive collections. Essentially it's an historical record of how the site behaved.

In of content published on both the BBC website and the social media platforms, we select almost all unique video and audio. For example, BBC3, Radio 1, and iPlayer Exclusives. We archive AV, audio and images to a high standard so all this content can be associated with all our other Television and Radio archive collections and re-used within the BBC. We also archive new innovations like 360 degree video, and Surround Sound online audio. And finally we archive thousands of images published online.

Social Media Archiving 30b5g

We aim to archive unique content published on social media platforms. We also archive a selection of the BBC’s Twitter s - the actual ‘Tweets’ - as a record of how the BBC communicates with the demographic who use Twitter as a social media tool. Many of these s complement the traditional TV & Radio output holdings, but also tell the story of the BBC’s corporate communications. Other institutions and organisations, such as The National Archives have begun archiving Twitter output as a way of archiving cultural memory and current communication methods. Only Tweets (including retweets and replies) from selected official BBC Twitter s are captured. Tweets from non-BBC s aren’t captured nor are any tweets from the general public. Alongside the BBC generated Tweets any images tweeted by the BBC are also captured. We also archive many of the videos that appear on Facebook & YouTube.

Our Web & Social media archives are maintained and preserved to the very best industry standards. Much of the content is still live online. If unique material is taken down from public view for editorial or copyright reasons, we still ensure we have captured and archived this material for internal re-use or research purposes.

Casualty: Robyn’s Story is a pilot project now live on BBC Taster and created via BBC Connected Studio’s Future of Content programme, where teams from across the BBC are invited to develop innovative digital content ideas around a specific brief. Casey Stander, Production Manager, discusses the creative process - from workshop through development to launch.

The theme for this Connected Studio brief was 'Smartphone Storytelling’, based on giving audiences a starring role in the form of internet-first ideas that look specifically at participation. The successful concept we developed was for The Casualty Storybook project, inviting fans to share in the life of one of the show’s most beloved characters, Nurse Robyn Miller. We have created a social media presence for Robyn, posting content for her across multiple social s that audiences can follow and interact with.

 To deliver relevant, topical and character-specific content is a challenge the project team continues to enjoy. In order to weave an engaging story on Robyn’s social media platforms we start by reading scripts and watching episodes. We use story lines and real-world events, such as the 2016 Olympics, to write and schedule posts as far as eight weeks in advance. This provides the framework of our story telling, which is then nuanced by live posting, commenting and replying out of hours, and during the show’s transmission.

To really capture the attention of fans, we aim to give them a real insight into both Robyn’s life and the life of the Emergency Department. We deliver this by carefully planning photo shoots, filming short videos (from Robyn’s point of view), as well as creating trailers and more formal content such as Q&As.

Each piece of content is painstakingly matched to storylines, and timed to ensure the fans enjoy a constant flow of scoops and behind the scenes action. An excellent example of how this careful planning can translate into doubling followers is the Date Night trailer we filmed and posted to coincide with episode 43 of series 30; Robyn and Glen getting back together was a major peak in our story, and this storyline coincided with the cliff-hanger ending of episode 43. All round this was a fantastic opportunity for us to ride the wave of excitement and enthusiasm generated around the episode.

While planning certainly helps, we have to ensure we are flexible and responsive to our audience. For example, the project team had decided to shoot a series of Holby Olympics videos to post over the show’s summer break. We kicked off with Robyn posting a beautiful photo of the opening ceremony. What we very quickly discovered is that Robyn’s fans were far more interested in watching Casualty than the Olympics – so we changed our plans instantly and filmed a series of short videos focusing on Robyn and her pals instead.

Striking the balance between content directly relating to episodes and content which is personal to Robyn and her friends is something we pay close attention to. The project team works closely with the actors, story producers and script editors to ensure our content is true to the character’s personality – this is absolutely vital. We are Robyn’s voice after all, and we take this responsibility very seriously.

Working as Project Manager on the Casualty Storybook has been a fascinating and unique experience – having the opportunity to interact directly with fans and to lead them along this roller-coaster adventure continues to be rewarding, eye-opening and thrilling. We are far from over though. There is much more to come and it is going to be epic!

I’m Ben Toone, assistant content producer at the BBC College of Production (CoP) website.

The site is a free online learning resource for the radio, television and online production communities offering videos, podcasts and articles from broadcasting innovators and experts.

It’s a new term feel for the College of Production with a new look and lots of new content to talk about.

With more and more top flight football clubs, from Manchester United to Chelsea, having their own digital channels, we take a look at one the world’s most famous club's TV channel and online presence. Plus we a look at social TV, Crimewatch online and how consumer technology is changing radio.

Rhiannon Jones talks about her role as a producer, presenter and reporter for Realmadrid TV, the station which broadcast the unveiling to Real Madrid fans of record breaking g Gareth Bale. It’s interesting to see how the channel makes the most of the fervent of Real Madrid fans from around the world, engaging them on social media platforms and with a bilingual YouTube channel.

What do Embarrassing Bodies Live, Downton Abbey and BBC Three's Free Speech all have in common? They are fantastic examples of how online and social media are key to engaging audiences beyond the reach of traditional TV, which was the theme of our BBC Academy masterclass, recorded at the recent Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.　

Crimewatch has always been an interactive programme right from its inception, with viewers able to get in touch with the team of detectives working on the live shows. Now the programme's website and social media channels offer even　more ways for viewers to get in touch or be informed of the latest police appeals.　In this film, assistant content producer Steven Green explains how he manages the show’s Twitter and web pages around the live show, feeding information to detectives working on the cases as well as keeping appeals　alive in public minds on the website long after live broadcast.

Our regular CoP Show podcast can be found on the BBC radio iPlayer app, which gets a brief mention in the second podcast from our tour of the BBC’s Blue Room (the first, looking at TV consumer technology and programme making can be found here). This time we looked at radio, from innovations in in-car listening to apps which bring on the potential of a personalised radio experience. This opening up of choice for listeners is either a threat or a shot in the arm for radio producers. It’s exciting stuff and as the BBC Blue Rooms Garry Green puts it "We need to use this technology to make things sound better". Have a listen and tell us what you think.　

Ben Toone is content producer for the BBC College of Production

I’m an Audience Researcher within BBC Future Media, which means I contribute to my department’s remit to measure product performance, understand audiences’ attitudes and behaviour and provide recommendations to inform decision-making in the future.

One of the areas I work across is social media; an area that continues to grow in visibility and importance. As Holly Goodier blogged last year, 77% of the UK online population now actively participates on the internet using social tools.

The likes of Facebook and Twitter get a lot of attention, but social media extends beyond social networks to include functionality such as commenting or sharing that can make any website, including BBC.co.uk (and indeed this very page), social.

However, for the purposes of this post, I will focus upon off-site activity – that which occurs outside of BBC.co.uk.

Off-site social media is a great way to reach and connect with our audiences, and as such we operate many s across our channels, brands and divisions to accomplish this. The majority of our s are within Facebook and Twitter, but several of our programmes and services also have a presence on sites such as Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube.

Watching our teams use these different environments in multiple ways is fascinating, but it also creates challenges when it comes to measuring how we are performing.

Listed below are eight challenges we face when assessing social activity, both directly related to our official presence and in of wider online conversations. Not all of these are limited to social media, and few if any are BBC specific, but they give an idea of some of the considerations we face:.

1. No official measurement source: TV has BARB and Radio has RAJAR – two well established bodies, with consensus on the most appropriate metrics to use. Within digital, there is the relatively new UKOM - while it offers a range of measures, it does not break down social media into specific s (such as @BBCSport on Twitter or BBC One on Facebook). Social networks may offer useful insight tools themselves, but only top-level information is made public. It can therefore be difficult to place performance in the context of the performance of other s or organisations.

2. Limited geographic restrictions: I work within the public sector side of the BBC, and so am principally interested in UK performance rather than global.  Again, insight tools can offer geographic splits but there isn’t much publicly available UK-specific data to compare to.

3. Aggregating across multiple s: It can be difficult to assess overall performance when multiple s are being used – for instance, if we wanted to measure combined performance across @BBCBreaking and @BBCNews on Twitter. Action-orientated metrics (such as measuring the number of ‘likes’ or views) can be added together, but others such as total audience cannot, since people that follow multiple s would be counted more than once unless data could be de-duplicated . The challenges of measuring your own organisation are magnified when trying to measure others.

4. Totalling activity across multiple services: The ideal would be to evaluate our performance across the entirety of social media, but different services with different functionalities with different ways of measuring make this impractical. For instance, is a Facebook share the equivalent of a Pinterest re-pin?

5. Distinguishing active from lifetime audience: Metrics such as followers or likes are based on lifetime activity – they take no of recency and so could count activity from several years ago. Changes over time can be used to assess growth, but it doesn’t give an accurate reflection of the active audience – people that interacted with the site more recently (e.g. in the last week or last month). Again, some insight tools offer this function, but once again there is an inability to place performance in context.

6. Interpreting behaviour: Adding up the number of comments or mentions produces a measure of audience engagement, but it assumes all interactivity is good when in fact audiences could be using social media to protest against something or talk about how much they hate a particular programme. Sentiment analysis can provide some context. While tools continue to improve and innovate, ambiguities in tone and meaning mean that analysis is not yet fully accurate

7. Identifying relevant activity: Counting the volume of mentions for a programme across social media could be limited to searching by the programme name, or it could include a search for mentions of the on-air talent, topic or notable incidents. Furthermore, that on-air talent can appear across multiple programmes or formats. Agreeing on parameters can be hard to do. Some tools do automate this to provide a consistent view for all s, but without an industry standard it is still possible for other organisations to announce radically different figures due to different measurement criteria. 

8. Measuring impact: Metrics such as likes or retweets are not ends in themselves, but are signifiers of audience engagement. Social media objectives should be broader than stimulating this type of behaviour alone, and could have goals such as increasing the audience figures for a TV or Radio programme or raising positive opinion towards a programme, channel or service. This is something that is hard to measure in any medium, but the nature of social, where ease of interaction encourages high volume of messages – makes it harder than most to measure this type of impact.

In a forthcoming post, I will outline some notable performances within social media to date, the above challenges notwithstanding. In the meantime, feel free to participate below the line with your thoughts.

Simon Kendrick is a Research Manager, Audiences, BBC Future Media

Hi everyone, today is the BBC Online Briefing in New Broadcasting House, London. This is a chance for the BBC to share the work it’s doing with partners and suppliers in the digital arena.

Host Kirsty Wark will have the opportunity to ask Future Media director Ralph Rivera some of your questions so if you have something you would like her to ask then leave a comment below, in Kirsty’s blog post or tweet us using the hashtag #BBCOnline.

We’ll be collating the news, discussions and opinions from the day using our Live blog so check it out, tweet your views and don’t forget to follow us on @bbcinternetblog.

Eliza Kessler is the content producer for the BBC Internet blog.

Hi, I'm Mark Channon, executive product manager of what we call Personalisation and Social. We're a friendly bunch with a ion for all things err… personalised and social.

Over in sunny White City we have been working on a number of features to make BBC Online more personalised such as the ability to add favourites in BBC iPlayer Radio.

For the moment, I wanted to briefly let you know how we are making it easier to share news articles, recipes and blog posts to your social network of choice.

You will find our share box across most of the BBC already, whether on BBC iPlayer, News, Sport, Radio, Weather or Food.

As of today you can now use our share plugin for easy sharing to Google+ and LinkedIn which our current line-up of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon.

s of Google+ and LInkedIn can now also benefit from easier sharing with just a couple of clicks.

You can read more about how we decide which services best fit our list on the BBC help pages.

Since you're still reading I'm guessing you may have an interest in what we plan to do in the future. If so, please give us some in the comments section below.

What could we offer that would make it simpler and easier to share BBC content? A share button personalised so 'you get to choose' where to share? Simple sharing on all your devices? Be as creative as you like and let us know your thoughts.

Mark Channon is executive product manager for BBC Personalisation and Social.

I’m Paul Buller, editor of the BBC College of Production (CoP) website.

Our site is a free online learning resource for the radio, television and online production community offering videos, podcasts and articles from broadcasting innovators and experts.

This week we’ve got some really interesting examples of how big shows are engaging their viewers in brand new experiences online.

Starting with ITV’s Emmerdale, we’ve a look at how the team put together the multiplatform extras for their incredible live 40th anniversary episode.

For the show’s producers, the 40th anniversary offered all the usual high drama as well as a perfect opportunity to attempt a world first in social media and broadcast innovation – a live episode produced entirely on location running alongside a behind the scenes webcast.

Both experiences gave loyal Emmerdale fans a totally unique angle on the drama with video from behind the scenes broadcast live across the internet. The behind the scenes segments were shot using 11 strategically positioned minicams so online viewers could see the crew working and the actors being cued as the live drama went out on ITV1.

Winterwatch, the BBC’s live, interactive wildlife programme, has led the way in of audience engagement and cross-platform programming.

This film on how they’re constantly improving and expanding their brand – even after ten years – is a real testament to how the team have listened to their online audience and given them a chance to really get involved every step of the way.

Finally, as you’ll have seen elsewhere on these pages, the recent Fusion: Future Fiction event held by the BBC was a great opportunity to learn ing the online world to tell your story.

Our intrepid team got stuck in and can bring you this interesting guide to transmedia storytelling as well as a podcast featuring interviews with some of the key speakers on the day. Enjoy.

Paul Buller is an editor for the BBC College of Production website.

I’m Mark Neves, a technical architect on the DNA Refactor Project.

What is DNA?

Regular readers of the Internet Blog will know that DNA is the platform that supplies Generated Content (UGC) in the form of comments, messageboard posts and the like to the BBC website. It also powers the moderation tools needed to manage this content. For a brief history of DNA and how it got its name please visit Wikipedia.

The DNA Refactor Project

The DNA Refactor Project is focused on rebuilding the DNA functionality using best-of-breed software engineering techniques. This blog post explains how DNA became what it is today and the plans for ‘refactoring’ the code base into a modern architecture making the platform easier to maintain, faster to extend and portable to other platforms.

Evolution of the DNA Code Base

Coding began with the creation of the h2g2.com website back in 1999. It was initially a Perl application with a SQL Server back end. Shortly after its inception the platform was acquired by the BBC and developed over the years using many technologies by approximately 24 different developers. (While researching this figure I naturally hoped to find that 42 developers had worked on it. Still, 24 is practically the same, digit-wise.)

The first major refactor was the move to C++. As you can see some functionality remained in Perl for a very long time. The second major change was the decision to implement all new features in C# in around 2006 and have, as a background task, the job of migrating existing C++ functions to C#.

Again, like the Perl code before it, some features and tools remain in the C++ code base to this day. With tight time scales and limited resources it’s always difficult to justify spending time rewriting or refactoring existing code. It’s an age old issue in software development.

The last major architectural development was to implement RESTful APIs to expose functionality to moderated comments (among other services), allowing the -facing elements to be implemented on the central BBC application platform. This drives comments on BBC News and Sports pages as you see them today.

Why Refactor?

So why is the BBC investing in the refactoring of the DNA code base? After all, DNA has stood the test of time providing a rock solid, reliable platform for hosting UGC and Moderation Services even in the most demanding of situations (such as comments on high profile News stories, moderated Twitter feeds during the Olympics and the extremely busy but now decommissioned 606 sports messageboard).

UGC is an important aspect of the BBC website and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The platform that delivers this requirement needs to be built for the future. Let’s examine the current DNA architecture to see where the issues lie:

With 24 developers working at different times over 14 years on the platform it’s not surprising that the code base is suffering from a little technical debt:

• Chunks of business logic can be found in all layers of the architecture making it extremely hard (if not impossible) to write proper unit tests. The only practical tests that can be written are functional end-to-end tests that can take a very long time to write and a long time to run.
• There’s lots of coupling between layers and within layers. This makes it harder to develop new features, fix bugs and reuse and extend existing functionality.
• DNA uses stored procedures which is a great way of maintaining a good level of separation between the application code and database, but it is still too intimately known to the application code to be able to switch persistence technology without rewriting a lot of code.
• There’s still a lot of functionality in the legacy C++ and C# ASP.NET code. It would be great if all that functionality were exposed through RESTful APIs making it easy to supply alternative UIs and consumers.

Another aspect is that the current code base has a large amount of functionality that is no longer used. The BBC sold h2g2 a couple of years ago and at that point the considerable amount of functionality that h2g2 exclusively used became redundant. Add to that the code behind other decommissioned social network sites like 606, Action Network, Get Writing and Comedy Soup and it’s clear that a lot of inactive code can be laid to rest.

This is by no means a criticism of the way DNA has evolved. DNA has had a number of very talented software engineers working on it over the years. The history of the product is long and interesting and the code base gets a lot of things right. The time has come to take a step back and see how we can do things even better.

The Brave New World

The engineers in the DNA team have always been keen to embrace best practices when developing software. The DNA Refactor project will result in a platform that embraces S.O.L.I.D. software development principles:

• S - Single responsibility principle: A class should have only a single responsibility.
• O - Open/closed principle: “software entities [… ] should be open for extension, but closed for modification”.
• L - Liskov substitution principle: “objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.”
• I - Interface segregation principle: “many client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface.”
• D - Dependency inversion principle: One should “Depend upon Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions.” Dependency injection is one method of following this principle.

Here’s what the new architecture will look like:

The main features are:

• Proper separation of concerns. Each layer does one job and one job only.
• The business logic is in one place. What’s more it is modelled using Plain Old CLR Objects, i.e. objects just concerned with the job of providing the functionality, oblivious to the complex subsystems around them, such as http requests and databases.
• There is no XSLT or presentation layer. The only way to use the functionality will be through the RESTful APIs. There will be no direct access to the APIs on the internet – functionality is exposed through BBC applications or specially written tools that moderation and functions that can be built on any platform.
• Each layer has its own suite of unit tests. These tests are short, simple to write and quick to run making them practical in a continuous integration scenario.
• Functional Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) tests are used to describe the behaviour of the whole system in the platform-independent language Gherkin.

It’s easy to see how you each layer could be ported to different platforms and technologies. The BDD tests would provide confidence that all the functionality has been ported successfully.

It would be interesting to hear your /comments below.

Mark Neves is a technical architect.