CBS News Confirmed vets what's real, separates fact from fiction on social media
(CBS DETROIT) - Following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania Saturday evening, CBS News Detroit's Luke Laster sat down with CBS News Confirmed Executive Editor Rhona Tarrant for a conversation on how the Confirmed team works to separate fact from fiction in a breaking news situation.
"CBS News Confirmed is really focused on visual verification and tracking misinformation online," Tarrant said.
Tarrant explained the vetting process of videos that begin popping up on social media during a breaking news event.
"In any breaking news story, very often, the videos and images are first going to emerge on social media, and it's our team's job to sort through those and to verify what is real and what's not," she said.
"On one side, we're verifying the real information, the real videos, the real eyewitnesses from the scene so that our audience can get the fullest picture of any news story when it's happening."
Tarrant says the CBS News Confirmed team is also tracking misinformation online so they can point out to viewers when something may have been seen on social media without a lot of context or that is factually inaccurate.
"Social media, unfortunately, is not the best place to find verified information. I think the biggest thing people have to keep in mind is to get their information from reliable sources," Tarrant says. "People should just take a moment when they're scrolling social media and not automatically believe everything they see," she added.
The full conversation between Tarrant and Laster can be seen in the video above.