We usually depend on journalists and credible news organizations to keep us informed, but not every country has a free press or can report the international news freely. In cities in Mexico plagued by drug cartels, for example, journalists have been hurt or killed for reporting on certain events for the "old way" of communicating news (Committee to Protect Journalists 2010). Citizen reporting via social media and "new ways" of communication can be anonymous and helpful especially in these cases. We should, especially because of the experiences in these countries, take citizen reporting via social media seriously, and work towards making it more effective and reliable.

A number of recent articles demonstrate the importance of social media in Mexico because of the drug cartels. Below is a visualization of the NPR article Mexican Drug Cartels Now Menace Social Media, a piece that discusses how Mexican drug cartels are now threatening social media users as well as traditional journalists trying to report on their activity:

The use of "media," the largest word in this word cloud from ManyEyes, is the centerpiece in this discussion on reporting information about drug cartels. The drug cartels, because of the efficiency of social media, try to identify the users posting via social media about information about safety for the community. Social media is often seen as a platform where users can produce information without mention of their gender, race, or socioeconomic background. Certainly, in the case of people reporting on the drug cartels via social media, users want to remain anonymous. But the drug cartels want to threaten such user anonymity. How can anonymous, independent users become reputable news sources, however, considering that they need to withhold their name and affiliations?

In order to preserve anonymity, independent users reporting information to help their local communities in Mexico can gain reputability on social media by posting the source of their information in the "comment" section of Twitter. Researchers Eni Mustafaraj, Panagiotis Metaxas, Samantha Finn, and Andrews Monro-Hernandez explore how technology can help verify the credibility of citizen reporting. The researchers visualized the tweets in the hashtag used to organize news among anonymous local sources and found that certain individuals were deemed more credible than others. Certain individuals, represented in the larger nodes below, wrote posts that were retweeted frequently due to their assumed reputability from the comments including source information. Here is a visualization the researchers made in Gephi:

The larger nodes in this visualization represent the social media users who were retweeted the most frequently. Their posts were deemed credible via the comment feature of Twitter, and also because of their reputation as a user. I'm still trying to work with Gephi to produce the visualizations I want it to make of tweets on the Boston marathon bombings, but I am interested in exploring what we can learn from this study in Mexico on validating individuals on Twitter by asking for the source. In the Boston Marathon bombings, one of the social media problems was that users trusted news sources that were not credible (such as Reddit), but assumed they were because they were associated with an organization.