The winning team, from MIT, found all 10 balloons in less than nine hours without ever leaving their computers. Indeed, they turned to social media, and Twitter in particular, to mobilize the public. At the beginning of the competition, the team announced that rather than keeping the $40,000 cash prize if they won, they would share the winnings with members of the public who assisted in the search for the balloons. Notably, they incentivized people to invite members of their social network to join the hunt, writing9: “We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all - we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on.” The Verily platform uses the same incentive mechanism in the form of points. Instead of looking for balloons across an entire country, however, the platform facilitates the verification of social media reports posted during disasters in order to cover a far smaller geographical area - typically a city. Think of Verily as a Pinterest board with pinned items that consist of yes or no questions. For example: “Is the Brooklyn Bridge shut down because of Hurricane Sandy?” Users of Verily can share this verification request on Twitter or Facebook and also email people they know who live nearby. Those who have evidence to answer the question post to the Verily board, which has two sections: One is for evidence that answers the verification question affirmatively; the other is for evidence that provides a negative answer. The type of evidence that can be posted includes text, pictures and videos. Each piece of evidence posted to the Verily board must be accompanied by an explanation from the person posting as to why that evidence is relevant and credible. As such, a parallel goal of the Verily project is to crowdsource critical thinking. The Verily platform is expected to launch at www.Veri.ly in early 2014. Machine computing The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in 2010 was widely reported on Twitter. As is almost always the case, along with this surge of crisis tweets came a swell of rumors and false information. One such rumor was of a tsunami warning in Valparaiso. Another was the reporting of looting in some districts of Santiago. Though these types of rumors do spread, recent empirical research has demonstrated that Twitter has a self-correcting mechanism. A study of tweets posted in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake10 found that Twitter users typically push back against noncredible tweets by questioning their credibility. 80