Visual User-Generated Content Verification in Journalism: An Overview

Over the past few years, social media has become an indispensable part of the news generation and dissemination cycle on the global stage. These digital channels along with the easy-to-use editing tools have unfortunately created a medium for spreading mis-/disinformation containing visual content. Media practitioners and fact-checkers continue to struggle with scrutinising and debunking visual user-generated content (UGC) quickly and thoroughly as verification of visual content requires a high level of expertise and could be exceedingly complex amid the existing computational tools employed in newsrooms. The aim of this study is to present a forward-looking perspective on how visual UGC verification in journalism can be transformed by multimedia forensics research. We elaborate on a comprehensive overview of the five elements of the UGC verification and propose multimedia forensics as the sixth element. In addition, different types of visual content forgeries and detection approaches proposed by the computer science research community are explained. Finally, a mapping of the available verification tools media practitioners rely on is created along with their limitations and future research directions to gain the confidence of media professionals in using multimedia forensics tools in their day-to-day routine.