As far as marking an entire channel (SMS, Twitter, Email, News) as trusted, no. However, you can automatically trust sources so as you add phone numbers into the system, you could just automatically trust those numbers. It’s what you’re asking for but it takes a few more steps to do (trusting each number individually).

Once we started processing text messages coming from Haiti and consequently submitted reports based on these messages to haiti.ushahidi.com, we created an unique public source of information. before that we were combing any other available sources for such reports manually. And it wasn’t unusual that some information was circulating the web (twitter, FB,…)for many days/weeks as people actually didn’t know how actual this information is, but at the same time they felt it is important to share such information because it sounded urgent. Once we opened the stream of reports based on text messages, it was suddenly very “fresh” source of information on the web and wild retweeting started. People even started submitting this information back to ushahidi through web forms not realizing that ushahidi is actually the original source. It took some effort of our team to ensure that we are not approving these reports in order not to create duplications in the system. My point is, if we can automatize this process, is there a way how to distinguish the original report from it’s retweets/copies? because if one information appears in many sources it doesn’t necessarily mean that it increases its importance and/or reliability. But, if I understand it correctly, automatic combing will add importance to one information if it comes from variety of sources? But I might be wrong.

Second question: at one point we decided that information coming through text messages is the best and most reliable source of information at the moment (serious emergency). Is there a way that user of Swift River could temporarily tag SMS based sources as something like “more reliable than others” in order to give them higher verification rating?

Thanks

Jaro