The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines contain a series of guidance notes outlining the Corporation’s policies on online newsgathering, social media, and internet research (BBC, n.d.). An ethnographic study of BBC newsrooms’ processing of user-generated content (UGC) in coverage of international conflict noted the evolution of policies and working practices within and between groups to minimize problems of verification (Johnston, 2016). Though other broadcast news providers are governed by Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code sections on due accuracy, they do not publish their social media verification policies in their editorial guidelines. The newspaper industry’s regulator IPSO requires all members to supply annual statements with information including internal policy on the verification of stories. Of the most recent set of annual statements, none of the national newspaper publisher members of IPSO provided evidence of dedicated policies or processes to protect journalism from digital misinformation (Independent Press Standards Organization, n.d.).
Journalists as individuals have a high regard for the need for social media verification. A 2018 survey of journalists’ working practices suggests that journalists are wary of information obtained from social media when developing stories, but that they have high confidence in their skills to verify information from social media sources (Spilsbury, 2018, p.36) Table 3 shows the ways in which journalists check social media content.
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The NCTJ offers training courses in social media reporting and verification, but, as with the information in Table 3, this denotes the individual skills and responsibilities of individual journalists rather than sophisticated organizational policies to mitigate against the infiltration of misinformation or disinformation into news coverage.
Empirical research suggests that there are some systemic problems in how certain UK news organization protect themselves from mis- and disinformation. A 2019 study found evidence of disinformation and strategic narratives spread by Russian state-linked media were being picked up and republished by certain tabloid newspapers, indicating a lack of sophistication in detecting targeted messaging disguised as news by motivated political actors (Ramsay & Robertshaw, 2019).
