This information – which isn’t readily accessible via YouTube itself – enables you to launch a two-pronged verification search. Once you’ve entered the video’s URL, this tool will extract the clip’s upload time and all associated thumbnail images.

When watching the latest viral video on YouTube, it’s important to be on the look-out for “scrapes”: a scrape is an old video, which has been downloaded from YouTube and re-uploaded by someone who fraudulently claims to be the original eyewitness, or asserts that the video depicts a new event.Īmnesty International has a simple but incredibly useful tool called YouTube DataViewer. Soon, one reported back: “Google Image Search says the photo is from 2012”. When a link to the story was posted to Reddit, sceptical users swiftly took to Google to query it. As the screenshot below shows, the “ISIS refugee” story could be debunked in less than a second. Both of the most popular services, Google Images and TinEye, found pages containing this image dating back to mid-2012. Not only is a reverse image search one of the simplest verification tools, it’s also the one that showed the “leaked” ISIS refugee photo was a fake.

Outlined below are six free, simple tools that any curious news reader can use to verify digital media. Fortunately, there are a few relatively effective verification techniques, which do not require specialist knowledge or costly software. It’s no longer enough to read the news – now, we want to understand the processes behind it. But ordinary people are also starting to take a more sophisticated approach to the content they view online.

Jeffrey's exif viewer