Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You can't trust everything you read on the internet. But a real-time rumor-tracking site is trying to change that.

It's called Emergent. And it's the brainchild of journalist and fellow at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Media, Craig Silverman.  "It's aiming to be a real-time monitoring of claims that are emerging in the press," Silverman told The Atlantic.

Silverman and a research assistant gather rumors that are being reported, which usually first crop up on social media and are then picked up by various news outlets.

They enter those stories into a database, and the stories that need to be debunked are assigned a "truthiness rating," according to GigaOm. That way they can track which stories claim to be true, which ones debunk the story, and which ones are just re-reporting the original story. ...