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Verification & Journalism
Verification & Journalism
Journalism instructors have implored their students for generations: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Careful and accurate journalism requires skepticism. Verification and fact-checking require a thorough and systematic common-sense approach. “Tools come and go, but what stays is the mindset,” stresses award-winning journalist Craig Silverman, the editor of The Verification Handbook: For Disinformation and Media Manipulation.
"What stays is your ability to look at something, whether it's an image, a video, an article, a meme and to sort of think about, okay, what is the claim here? What is the evidence supporting it? Who is this coming from? And to be able to sit there and think critically about it, to pause, to think about it and to make some good decisions about how to find out more, how to determine whether it's true or false are still in that gray zone of in between"
Video
Video
Timothy Caulfield teaches at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Law and School of Public Health and holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. He is a world-leading thinker on misinformation and disinformation. This video describes the importance of media and scientific literacy.
This video explores the critical role journalists play in combating misinformation and disinformation.
Open-source Journalism & Open-source Intelligence
Open-source Journalism & Open-source Intelligence
Coined in 1999 by the journalist Andrew Leonard in Salon.com, open-source journalism describes a new “collaborative process” in reporting, whereby journalists use online tools and audiences to find information and beta-test their stories. A close cousin of participatory and citizen journalism, open-source journalism has evolved since Leonard’s initial praise of taking advantage of the “immense amount of expertise out there on the Net.” Journalists have shifted their focus to open-source intelligence or OSINT in recent years.
OSINT uses publicly available data – geospatial, media sources, user-generated information and databases – to collect and analyze information for authentication, verification, fact-finding, and answering intelligence questions. The visual to the right illustrates examples for each category.
Credit: Mount Royal University © 2024
Stages of OSINT
Stages of OSINT
“The promise of open-source research is that anyone – not just journalists or researchers at select institutions – can contribute to investigations that uncover wrongdoing and hold perpetrators of crimes and atrocities to account,” writes Giancarlo Fiorella, the Director for Research and Training at the investigative collective Bellingcat,
OSINT usually involves five stages.
Preparation includes determining the goals and objectives of the research – and what sources might answer questions.
Collection – the most important step – involves collecting the data and information to answer the questions posed in the preparation.
Processing entails organizing the collected information.
In analysis and production, the researchers interpret the collected data. Finding patterns or histories to make conclusions.
Dissemination entails telling stories with the analyzed data. Reporters share their answers to the questions they posed to the public after considering the ethics of making the information public.
Bellingcat leads the way in OSINT
Bellingcat leads the way in OSINT
The Netherlands-based Bellingcat investigative journalism organization focuses on open-source intelligence and fact-checking. The collective’s investigations uncovered human rights abuses by the Cameroon Armed Forces and critical insight into the poisoning of Russian dissidents Alexi Navalny, Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
Bellingcat offers examples of freely available databases of open-source, state-of-the-art digital trace tools. The investigative organization’s toolkit includes satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and more.
The Bellingcat's Online Tools offers many online resources for OSINT work.
Verification and fact-checking principles
Verification and fact-checking principles
First Draft News offers five practical pillars of verification when assessing information:
Provenance: Is the information original?
Source: Who created, wrote, filmed or captured the information?
Date: When was the information created?
Location: Where was the information created?
Motivation: What’s the agenda behind the information? Why did someone create it?
These principles guide how journalists assess the information they discover through reporting, including the use of online verification tools. Digital tools – simple Google searches even – can find information – but it is up to journalists to determine the provenance, source, date, location and motivation of that material.
Online verification tools / Spotting AI-generated content or deepfakes
Online verification tools / Spotting AI-generated content or deepfakes
The online tools listed below can help you verify information, but remember to apply common sense and standard – old-fashioned – reporting techniques such as observation and interviewing to confirm the accuracy of suspicious information.
✅ Fact-checking Search
Google Fact Check Explorer – This tool searches AFP Fact Check and other sources of information already checked by professional fact-checkers.
FactCheck Explorer even allows image searching.
✅ Image Verification Tools
Google Images offers a quick and easy way to locate where an image is published on the web, or to find similar images. Simply right-click on the image, click copy the image address, and then paste it into Google Image Search.
Other excellent image search engines include TinEye, Bing, and Yandex.
For more information, explore this comprehensive guide to reverse image search
For further details regarding the reverse image search capabilities of different search engines, please see the DomainTools website.
✅ Artificial intelligence (AI) verification
Several online tools search the World Wide Web for photos of a person. If the face doesn’t appear in these searches, it might be a clue that it’s fake.
Search4faces.com – Finds photos of a person all across the web
Facecheck.ID – Find people online by photo.
FacePlusPlus.com – Check the likelihood that two faces belong to the same person.
Jimpl.com – Look at metadata from photos
Deepfake and AI-generated content detection tools
Deepfake and AI-generated content detection tools
Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye can help with image verification. The tool allows you to trace the history of an image and detect its manipulation.
DeepFake-O-Meter analyzes images, video and audio to provide a probability of a file being fake. The tool, created by researchers at the Media Forensics Lab at the University at Buffalo, requires users to set up a free account.
WinstonAI offers a text and image verification tool. Created by a private company, the tool allows users to input text to see if it was produced through ChatGPT or other text-generating tools. For a premium subscription, the tool also includes image detection.
Bellingcat’s Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit also offers features several online video and image verification tools.
A warning: like all online verification tools, AI and deepfake detectors are imperfect and are not guaranteed to work every time. Deepfake detection tools aren’t always accurate, but they can help you question the authenticity of text, audio, images, and videos.
Always apply the SIFT method – stop, investigate, find and trace – to assess information quickly. Journalists should always revert to First Draft News' five practical pillars of verification to interrogate suspicious content.
You can read more about spotting Deepfakes and AI-generated content here.
✅ Video verification tools & spotting AI-generated fakes
Invid offers comprehensive tools for image and video verification. The Chrome extension plugin allows users to “quickly get contextual information” about Facebook and YouTube videos. InVid provides image and video date, location and copyright metadata, critical variables in First Draft News’ five pillars of verification.
Invid can also help you spot AI-generated content or Deepfakes.
Open the InVid toolbox and click on Deepfake.
Insert a link to analyze the video. The tool extracts a clip from the video and gives you a percentage score
The tool extracts minute details to help identify AI-generated content or deepfakes. Be careful: the results may not be accurate. Still, the tool can help you plot the next steps in your investigation. This video details the process.
Invid also performs reverse image searches with Google, TinEye, Bing, Baidu, or Yandex search engines. To simplify things, InVid fragments videos from various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Daily Motion) into keyframes, allowing users to explore keyframes with a magnifying lens and apply forensic filters to still images.
Watch Frame by Frame and Amnesty Internation Youtube Data Viewer are other sites for getting keyframes and metadata from videos.
✅ Digital footprint tracing or backgrounding someone
Journalists often want to investigate – or background – the people at the story's centre. For example, when a person is charged with a crime, journalists frequently investigate open-source information – including court documents, land titles, personal property registries, bankruptcy records, and professional directories – to find out more information. Journalists also use digital footprint tracing tools to uncover reportable information.
Digital footprint tracing relies on four types of information.
Intentional public information – ownership records, court records, registries.
Accidental public information – data leaks, exposed data.
Intentional private information – what people put on social media, blogs, websites, bios on company sites or conference bio pages.
Accidental private information – from friends, colleagues, family and caller ID apps.
Journalists and investigators pivot from new information to the following new details in digital footprint tracing. A name, for instance, helps locate an email or date of birth. The journalist or researcher may find an address or phone number from a social media account. These pieces of information may help unearth usernames, registered businesses and associations.
This table offers some standard online search tools for digital footprint tracing.
✅ Search tools for sharing platforms
MW Geofind – Searches YouTube by location for geotagged videos.
Whatsmyname.app – See where a username shows up across many sites.
✅ Internet Archive
Internet Archive / Wayback Machine provides a partial view of previous versions of web pages. This helps confirm the provenance, date and source of content. The online archive can also help verify information by locating older versions of websites. Notably, the Wayback Machine helps find deleted pages or track how a website has changed. Wayback Machine also allows journalists or researchers to save or archive the website as proof of what their investigation unearthed.
The ethics of OSINT
The ethics of OSINT
OSINT comes with ethical concerns. Unearthing new information – or digging up a juicy detail about someone from their social media – requires responsible and careful consideration before making it public.
A good rule of thumb – the harm principle – asks journalists and investigators to consider the potential impact of publishing information on three key groups. What’s the good and harm of revealing information for (1) the public, (2) the journalist or investigator’s source(s) and (3) the reputation or credibility of the journalist/news organization or investigator and who they work for?
Open-source databases and archives
Open-source databases and archives
Explore the House of Commons Hansard records, including keyword searches.
A searchable database of court judgements from all Canadian courts.
This provides a way to see Indigenous territories, treaties and languages worldwide.
This online tool provides an archive of research material for investigative reporting.
This online resource offers a database of maps of municipal public infrastructure and buildings across Canada
This online database offers digitized access to historical Canadian newspapers.
This open legal-entity database offers access to more than 140 government registries.
Better Google Searches
Better Google Searches
Before you can verify information, you need to find it. The worldwide web can sometimes feel like a monster. Algorithms – optimized for engagement – shape what we see. Discovering information can feel unfeasible, even daunting.
This section offers tips and tricks from the Google News Initiative for searching for information strategically. These techniques can optimize your search techniques – and maybe even cut down on the time you spend looking for information when up against a deadline.
The Google News Initiative helps journalists and publishers combat misinformation. It provides journalists with tools, training and resources to help them find, verify and tell engaging stories.
This table offers some tips and tricks for maximizing your searches using Google.
Image search optimizers
Image search optimizers
Search optimizers for images
Examples
Add colours to your image search
Taylor Swift red and white
Copyleft trolling is an unfortunate ongoing problem. Make sure you understand what’s required of you under the terms of the image’s license before using it.
Find free-to-use images
Use the tools button. Navigate to Creative Commons licenses to find images you can use.
Copyleft trolling is an unfortunate ongoing problem. Make sure you understand what’s required of you under the terms of the image’s license before using it.
Other Google search resource
Other Google search resource
X (Twitter) searches
X (Twitter) searches
Here’s a detailed guide for searching X (formerly Twitter).
Test Your Knowledge
Test Your Knowledge
OSINT allows journalists and researchers to find a lot of information, but ethics need to guide our decisions to make it public. What three groups should you consider when considering the good and harm of releasing information?
Answer: A good rule of thumb – the harm principle – asks journalists and investigators to consider the potential impact of publishing information on three key groups. What’s the good and harm of revealing information for
the public,
the journalist or investigator’s source(s) and
the reputation or credibility of the journalist/their news organization and the investigator and who they work for?
Other Resources and Readings
Other Resources and Readings
Documents
Documents
Videos
Videos
Fact-checking tools – Buzzfeed video 1(verifying images)
Fact-checking tools – Video 2: Looking up Claims and Website Owners
Fact-checking tools – Buzzfeed video 3 (social media accounts)
Digital forensics reporter breaks down how to spot AI-generated "people" | ABC News Verify
How to Identify AI Images and Deepfakes in Media | Living St. Louis (PBS)
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