Effective Sourcing of Digital News from Social Media: Picking the Real from Fake, the Truth from Hype

Social media has become an integral part of our lives today. The number of social media platforms and their users is growing rapidly in South Asia. It has provided new opportunities and thrown new challenges for media organisations and journalists. The wealth of information posted on social media is being used by journalists in diverse ways like new breaking, beat monitoring, approaching leaders and experts, and adding flavour to their stories. However, there are formidable challenges too, including information overload, accuracy, credibility and impartiality of both the content and news source. Some useful tools are also available to help journalists in accessing, sorting and analysing useful information. This chapter attempts to throw light on the tools and techniques to source news effectively from social media, the risks involved and the filters that need to be applied to pick the real and verified news from the immense pool of data uploaded on social media platforms and updated every moment.