Fact Checking & Verification for Reporting

PROVENANCE: Are you looking at the original account, article, or piece of content?
SOURCE: Who created the account or article, or captured the original piece of content?
DATE: When was it created?
LOCATION: Where was the account established, the website created, or piece of content captured?
MOTIVATION: Why was the account established, the website created, or the piece of content captured?

Journalism guides that cover newsgathering, verification, responsible reporting, online safety, digital ads and more.

1. Search for keywords people actually use
2. For eyewitnesses, search for the first person – ‘me’, ‘my’
3. Search for misspellings and typos
4. Use the right platform
5. Put phrases in quotation marks, and check other syntax errors
6. Don’t overcomplicate it – long queries are more likely to break

Search many online databases including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter from one page.

A fact checking tool from Google.

From Poynter.

A Google Chrome extension that rates the reliability of news publications.

Bellingcat is a nonprofit investigative newsroom that utilizes open source research methods for its investigations.

Various guides, case studies

Bellingcat also offers workshops - for a fee - on various open source methods, such as scraping data.

A Google Chrome extensions that allows you to conduct a reverse image search.

Upload an image or past the image's URL to search where it's been featured.

A free Google Chrome extension that helps journalists verify content on social media networks.

Watch youtube and Vimeo videos frame by frame.

A mashup of synchronized Google Maps, Aerial Imagery and Google Street View.

Copy the URL of an image or drag and drop the image into the search bar to check its veracity.

An application that determines the time of a day a photo was taken.

Search for verified user-generated videos by topic or keyword. You can search, but you have to pay to use the content.

Another reverse-image search tool.

A guide from Africa Check.

Exchangeable image file format, or EXIF, holds important data about a photo, such as the settings used to take the photo as well as the location. EXIF Data Viewer is a tool that allows you to look up an image's EXIF data by uploading that image.

Another tool that allows you to look up the EXIF data of an image.