How’d That Aviation Story Go Viral? Blame Artificial Intelligence
Skift Take
If it happens on an airline and someone tweets it, journalists will know. It's often not because of their top-rate investigative reporting skills. Instead, they're using an artificial intelligence platform that flags interesting posts on social media. The future is here, folks.
Here’s a secret for you: Even the best journalists know just a tiny fraction of what happens in a major airline’s operation.
We receive some tips, but we aren’t so plugged in that we know about every reservation system failure, celebrity meltdown, emergency landing, diversion, or go-around. So three years ago, when American Airlines started receiving phone calls from journalists about incidents that had just happened, no one from the airline knew why.
“We would have some sort of disruption and we would have 10 media calls within a matter of minutes,” American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said. “We couldn’t figure out what was going on. We said, ‘Where are you getting this from?’ The timing was always odd. That’s when we realized, this was Dataminr.”
Dataminr is a company that uses artificial intelligence to mine Twitter for potentially newsworthy tweets, and alerts journalists and corporations. If a person with 12 followers witnesses a fight on an a
