Finding misinformation with ‘rumor cues’ | First Draft

If you’re a reporter, getting your queries right really matters.

In 2015, Daniel Victor of The New York Times was searching for witnesses to an incident on a plane involving a female passenger and a Hasidic Jewish man who didn’t feel comfortable sitting next to her. Victor found that querying for “hasidic” and “flight” on social media brought up a lot of people talking about the incident, but not people who were actually there.

But then he discovered something. There were three words that could identify genuine eyewitness accounts: “me,” “my” and “I.”

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