Potential App: Checkdesk

Checkdesk is an open source tool for crowdsourced journalism allowing open sources and citizens to pool resources and information to verify reports.

Major stories have been produced using checkdesk such as the report on the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine, which Bellingcat attributed to the Russian made BUK missile launcher well ahead of reports by official independent investigators, amidst masses of conflicting claims and reports across mainstream media, and of course from governments.

http://checkdesk.org/

Checkdesk is a liveblogging tool for journalists, with built-in tools to
allow citizen journalists and staff journalists alike to make and
verify reports. Anyone from the newsroom community can submit a report
— a Tweet, a photo, video or other type of media — and add details that
bring important context to the report. Staff journalists can then add
these reports to a developing story.

Checkdesk is a multilingual custom CMS built upon the Drupal 7 PHP
content management platform. Technically speaking, Checkdesk is a Drupal
distribution. It is available free and open source on Github.

Bellingcat video summarising use of checkdesk

3 Likes

The app looks to be a winner, but the example you quoted was ripe investigative endeavor :wink:


A contrarian view of Eliot Higgins (proprietor of Bellingcat)…

Choose random, anonymous (and probably fake) images from social media to suit whatever point you want to make - no need for any verification whatsoever.

1 Like