By Jonathan Lundberg (c)

Welcome to this part of the course, which we call “an introduction to the verification toolbox”.

I wanna start right away by asking the question “What is online verification?”. The short answer is: “Fact-checking viral content”.

What the internet has done is to make everyone a publisher. So while we as journalists have been fact-checking our own reporting for ages, this has created the need for a new genre: How do we fact-check things that are already in the public sphere, with the help of digital tools?

I would argue that this requires a new skillset, which traditionally hasn’t been present in newsrooms: a structured way of finding emerging viral content, and to quickly be able to verify or debunk it, optimally before it has reached or been accepted as a truth by a broader audience.

For this purpose, I want to serve you with five different tools and methods for online verification, which OSINT researchers consider to be the fundamentals:

(1) Reverse image search – how to use search engines such as Google to find earlier uploads of an image or video, or to find similar visual content which could help you identify elements of the one you’re currently investigating

(2) Forensic image analysis – these are methods which could help you investigate whether a photo has been edited or manipulated in some way

(3) Metadata – information about information, which could immediately reveal when, where and with what equipment a photo was taken.

(4) Identifying AI-generated content – we’ll discuss the emerging flood of AI-generated fake content, and the current state of AI fact-checking

(5) Archiving and archive research – how we archive our research, to make sure it doesn’t disappear, and how we can use online archives to find the original versions of content that has since been deleted or edited.

These are five of the techniques that I think most fact-checkers will find most commonly useful – but there are many more out there. For example, if you want to master geolocation, figuring out where something happened, or chronolocation, figuring out when it happened, there are incredibly cool and useful tools and methods for this too. But let's at least start here.

Before we begin, I want to emphasize the most important thing for a fact-checker: Be the most loyal follower of the bad actors in the context that you’re reporting in.

That is, follow the least truthful persons or groups, and make sure to be the first one to see their latest posts. In that way, you’ll often catch things before they even go viral, and by the time a false story reaches a broader audience, you might even be done with your fact-check.

It’s of course just as big of a problem, if not even bigger, when people who usually don’t tell lies suddenly make false claims – people are more inclined to trust them, as they’re more broadly expected to be truthful. Therefore it’s important to have a wide monitoring, and make sure to catch and fact-check these stories too. The more you know about what’s happening on social media in general, that is relevant to your reporting, the better.

And remember: verification isn’t necessarily about proving something false. Proving an unbelievable claim to actually be true can often be just as big of a story.

So gather your own list of social media accounts that could help you stay on top of doubtful narratives in your own area of coverage, and let's get into our first tool to verify or debunk the content that you might face there.

References

All exercise images are collected here