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After a false CNN iReport, several people were convinced that Capt. Ron Johnson, the Ferguson native and Missouri Highway Patrolman in charge of the city's protests, was a gang member and, more astonishingly, was flashing gang signs in public with residents. As The Washington Post reported, a now deleted iReport featured Johnson making a hand gesture with a young man. Both were making the greeting symbol from the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, which was mistaken for a gang sign.

My 7th grade social studies teacher and "gang" member Ron Johnson throwing up their "gang" sign pic.twitter.com/diqJzgpYmE — RandaSantana (@DearRanda) August 19, 2014

For future reference, here's how to not recklessly accuse people of being in gangs:

1. Don't get your news from unverified CNN iReports

CNN applies some moderation to its iReports platform, but everything goes up. “We don’t prescreen anything before it’s posted (to the iReport website), but we do apply a level of moderation to every single piece of content,” Lila King, the participation director for CNN Digital, told Poynter in 2012. “Let’s say I upload a video, it will published directly to the site as long as I register and give some contact information.” In April the platform noted that only a handful of stories are verified by CNN staff:

We receive hundreds of iReports a day, and only a fraction of those are cleared and approved for CNN's non-user-generated networks and platforms, after a CNN producer fact-checks and verifies the details of a story. When a story is approved, the "Not Verified for CNN" bar disappears and is replaced by a red "CNN iReport" bug that lets the community know a story has been cleared.

CNN's iReport is occasionally spammed with false reports, meaning it requires a bit of skepticism from the reader. That leads to our second point: