BBC College of Journalism: Verifying YouTube’s Syrian ‘hero boy’ video

Chris Hamilton, social media editor at BBC News has posted on the College of Journalism blog about the online Syrian ‘hero boy’ video phenomenon. The video, which claimed to show a young boy rescuing a girl in a shoot-out in Syria, quickly spread across the internet. Meanwhile the BBC’s User Generated Content Hub (the world’s first newsgathering operation of its kind) and BBC Monitoring struggled to verify that the video was genuine. Here’s an extract from Chris’ blog:

“Even as we translated the Arabic heard on the video and looked for other clues, the producers working to verify it noted that on one of the most widely shared YouTube versions there were comments questioning whether it was real. Similar comments were seen in a discussion thread on Reddit. Although that’s not uncommon with Syrian video, as both sides engage in a fierce propaganda war, the volume seemed high - but that wasn’t conclusive in itself.

Ultimately, no-one internally could say for sure whether the video was real or not - which isn’t unusual with content like this. BBC News frequently runs video where we haven’t filmed it, or obtained it directly ourselves, and can’t vouch for the source. We signal this to audiences by saying we haven’t been able to ‘independently verify’ it.

But in this case there were enough doubts - especially over possible dubbing of the voices, and the moment the boy is ‘shot’ - for the UGC Hub to advise that the video shouldn’t run on BBC News outlets.

As the Syria ‘hero boy’ video racked up more than five million YouTube views over the following days, the raging debate about it was covered by the team behind BBC Trending, which reports on stories trending around the world.

Then, hours after their story went up, there was a stunning development, as Anne-Marie Tomchak of BBC Trending explains: “We discovered that the video was made by a group of Norwegian film-makers in Malta earlier this year.””

Read the rest of this post on the College of Journalism blog.

Hannah Khalil is Digital Content Producer, About the BBC Website and blog

• Find out more about the BBC's User Generated Content Hub
• Read #BBCTrending: Syrian 'hero boy' video faked by Norwegian director