and family. Increasingly, at any news event around the world there are “accidental journalists”: people standing in the right place at the right time with a smartphone in their hands. As Anthony De Rosa, the former social media editor for Reuters and current editor-in-chief of Circa, writes6: “The first thought of the shooter is usually not: ‘I need to share this with a major TV news network’ because they don’t care about traditional television news networks or more likely they’ve never heard of them. They have, however, heard of the Internet and that’s where they decide to share it with the world.” Similarly, during breaking news events, the audience is often more likely to turn to social networks for information, meaning first responders and emergency organizations are using social networks themselves. Unfortunately, these news events invite false information to circulate, either deliberately or by accident. Therefore, journalists and humanitarian professionals should always start from a position that the content is incorrect. During emergencies, when information can literally affect lives, verification is a critical part of the newsgathering and information dissemination process. The importance of verification The ability for anyone to upload content, and to label or describe it as being from a certain event, leaves many journalists, and particularly editors, terrified about being hoaxed or running with false content. Some people go out of their way to deliberately hoax news organizations and the public by creating fake websites, inventing Twitter accounts, Photoshopping images or editing videos. More often, the mistakes that happen aren’t deliberate. People, trying to be helpful, often find mislabeled content from previous news events and share it. Below is an example of a man apologizing after tweeting a photo7 emailed to him by his wife. She had told him it 26