This type of company is especially relevant today because there are so many editing software's that people could easily forge a picture or video and upload it to a social networking site and it could go viral. Some of their clients include: BBC, Yahoo News, and The Wall Street Journal. With everything going on in Syria right now, the use of social media is crucial because the government is only allowing a select few journalists to enter, and those who are there are limited to what they can report. Social Media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are crucial in keeping the rest of the world informed as to what is actually going on over there. So a company like Storyful is important to news organizations because they can verify the validity or falsehood of a post.
This article discusses how social media sites are being used by Syrian citizens to speak out against the government and show what kind of corruption and violence is going on over there: http://www.mediameasurement.com/the-role-of-social-media-in-the-syrian-civil-war/
Social Media sites are the only way that Syrian citizens can speak out against the government without being harmed or killed. Most of the time people will post footage as an anonymous user, so again, it is important to verify this footage. Syria is considered the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Since the beginning of 2012, 52 journalists have died covering the war in Syria. Because of this danger, social media sites are now being used as an extension to news sites. This is a long YouTube video, but you can watch just a few minutes of it to see how important individual citizens' video footage is for news organizations. This video shows various videos compiled together that is shown on different news sites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vdkyJ0cjgo
News organizations track Twitter and Facebook to see the kind of traffic that is going on in a certain area. If traffic (posts) is high, then they know something is going on. For example, the news found out that chemical weapons were being used on Syrians from a YouTube video. This video showed chemical weapons being used on dozens of people. Often times a news story will break on social media sites before it even gets to the news stations. One of the biggest recent examples was the killing of Osama Bin Laden back in 2011. A man by the name of Sohaib Athar was living in Abbottabad, Pakistan at the time of the raid, and was tweeting at 1 A.M. about all of the helicopters and fire fighting that was going on. He did not know exactly what was going on, but he knew that it had to be big. Any news organization seeing this tweet would have had a good guess that it had to do with Bin Laden. Here is a timeline of events of the Bin Laden tweets: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitter.reports/index.html
Social Media is no longer just being used for keeping friends connected, it is being used as a digital extension to the news and it provides information to the government to help them make a decision. When Congress votes next week on whether or not to intervene in Syria, I imagine that they will be viewing (except McCain who will be playing poker on his phone; poor joke, I know) tweets, YouTube videos, and pictures from all of these social media sites from people who are experiencing the effects of the Syrian war firsthand. Social Media sites are also being used by citizens and military men and women to voice their opinions about the war. You better believe that Congressmen will be seeing how their constituents feel. This is a picture of a Marine voicing his opinion over Twitter
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