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May 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda What do you get when you combine a photo-sharing mobile platform like Instagram with more geo-location awareness and a Reddit-style voting system for stories breaking all over the world?
Answer: Signal, the app citizen journalism may well have been been waiting for.
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The Signal app is currently in private beta launch, and will hit app stores for the iPhone in the next few months. You can sign up to test the app here.
Signal is the brainchild of Lebanese entrepreneur Mark Malkoun, who says it will address the fundamental limitations of sharing stories on social media.
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“Initially, Twitter and Facebook were designed to get news from people or brands or celebrities,” Malkoun told Mashable. “Now, if something is happening say three miles away from you, say something really important, Twitter won’t systematically inform you unless you follow someone who happens to be there.”
Facebook has since expanded to allow people to subscribe to others, and anyone could still search for news on Twitter via hashtags. Still, actual news can become muddied in other posts that have nothing to do with these news stories, Malkoun said. And needing to follow or subscribe to people first still gives weight to “power users.”
But what if you just happen to be at the right place at the right time when it comes to breaking news?
With Signal, the emphasis is on quick and easy photojournalism. Users capture media that they then upload to the app with a geo-tagged location and a short caption of around 60 characters. And if multiple people happen to be covering the same story, an algorithm for the app pushes the photos together, so the content becomes classified under the same story.
Signal’s strategy hinges on an idea that has already turned Instagram into one of the hottest digital platforms — oneworth $1 billion to Facebook. As Instagram’s 50 million users can attest, there’s a strong desire to share visual, mobile stories with the world.
When users open the app, they can view news photos according to their location, most recent upload or what others have voted top news. You can choose to see the top stories by country, continent or the world as a whole.
“The idea is that you find out what is happening in a very simple way, and more importantly, a democratic way,” Malkoun said. “We chose [the name] Signal because it’s based on the territory, and the signal has a frequency. The more votes you collect, the bigger the verification.”
But will people actually vote for newsworthy photos, or will it simply become a popularity contest? After all, the 25 most popular users on Instagram are already famous in real life.
The Signal team acknowledges this concern, but the goal of the app is to steer clear of it, Malkoun said. The point is for the stories behind the photos — not necessarily the people taking them — to have influence.
To make sure that people aren’t posting old stories or promoting personal agendas, every photo must be geo-tagged within the past 72 hours. “Usually, the power of a story diminishes the further you are from it geographically,” Malkoun said. “For example, if you live in the United States and there’s a car accident in Germany, you might not be interested. But take the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. If you were in Japan [at the time], anything might be interesting.”
The Signal app is coming out of Lebanon, and Malkoun acknowledges the Arab Spring helped him consider what a citizen journalism app needed.
“Everything we took in developing Signal, we took from reality…Of course, the whole environment here was inspired by the Arab Spring, no matter what,” he said. .”When we started, the whole news was about Gaddafi and Syria.”
SEE ALSO: How Citizen Journalism Is Reshaping Media and DemocracyAlthough the app only supports photos for now, Malkoun and the Signal team plan to add a video component in the future.
The app’s emphasis on photos should help break down language barriers. Still, heavily-signaled stories — those that users like or vote for the most — will be translated so that audiences can have a better understanding of on-the-ground events across the world.
The kind of news people will document and share with the app is not so much as important as the fact that they will have a chance to get their stories out, and determine what’s important themselves, Malkoun said.
“It could range from breaking news to social news, but most importantly…A lot of times, there are a lot of subjects that are not talked about,” he said. “As soon as one reporter talks about it, that’s when it becomes news. [But] this person just spoke about it for one reason or another. Here, every story that gets in the system will have an equal chance.”
Do you think Signal will revolutionize citizen journalism? Will stories around the world really have an equal chance to come to light? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Photos courtesy of the Signal Team
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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