The document provides extensive information and resources for journalists to verify user-generated content online. It lists tools to analyze photos and videos, investigate digital footprints and timestamps, and determine geo-locations. Tips are included for understanding social media privacy settings, cross-referencing accounts and platforms, and obtaining original content metadata. FirstDraft.org also offers online courses and checklists to guide the verification of images, videos, and stories using various open-source tools and search engines.

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Becoming a verification ninja
Sona Patel | @sona
Tools for your toolkit
● WatchFrameByFrame.com: Watch a video frame-by-frame. Slow it
down;
zoom in on details. Really helpful when you want to identify faces, shapes,
insignia
● deturl.com: Let’s you download a YouTube video and rotate it (in case it’s vertical, upside down, etc.)
● Verexif: Upload a photo to view its EXIF data, including latitude and longitude coordinates.
● KarmaDecay.com: Reverse-image search of Reddit
● FirstDraft.org’s mobile verification toolkit
Tips and tricks for tracking the source, date/time and location
1. Source:
• Understand privacy settings: Depending on the social platform, many users may not even
be aware of the vulnerabilities and gaps in their accounts. This presents an opportunity (or
exploit) for journalists.
• Get a sense of their network: Just because their account is locked, doesn’t mean their
friends’ accounts are.
• Cross-platform checks: In the same way many people use the same passwords, they’ll also
use the same username across platforms and emails. This is often an excellent reference point
for a deep dive.
• Secure an original piece of content: All content is embedded with metadata or at least
context, which opens avenues for investigation. A photo might have EXIF data and an email
might have an IP address.
2. Date/time:
• What was the weather like? Use Wolfram Alpha to extract meteorological information
about that particular date.
• Cross-reference audio and visual content. The more visual content you find, the easier
each one is to verify.
• Know timestamp rules. Each platform has its own rules. Be cautious of screenshots, and
don’t assume that the upload date is when the image was originally captured.
3. Location:
• Sometimes you can see a location connected to a particular tweet, Facebook Instagram post,
but this can be easily manipulated. You want to independently find the location of a photo
or video on a map or satellite image.
• Listen. Audio often provides invaluable information about where the incident is occurring.
Keep an ear out for phrases, radio, language and accents.

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Tools from First Draft for verifying user-generated content
Verifying images and video
❏ Google Translate Chrome extension
❏ RevEye Chrome extension
❏ EXIF Viewer Chrome extension
❏ Wayback Machine Chrome extension
❏ Fake video news debunker by InVID Chrome extension
❏ Session Buddy Chrome extension
❏ First Draft Visual Verification Checklist for Photographs
❏ Google Reverse-Image Search
❏ First Draft Visual-Verification Checklist for Videos
❏ TinEye
❏ Yandex Image Search
❏ EXIF Viewer
Investigating digital footprints and researching timestamps
❏ Inteltechniques
❏ Pipl
❏ Spokeo
❏ Usersearch
❏ Webmii
❏ Whois.icann.org
❏ Wolfram Alpha
❏ YouTube Data Viewer (Amnesty)
Geo-location
❏ Google Maps
❏ Wikimapia
❏ Open Street Map
❏ Yandex Maps
❏ Baidu Maps
❏ Naver Maps
❏ NewsCheck Chrome extension

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Links and resources
● FirstDraftNews.org’s two free online courses on verification: Quick Start to Verifying Online
Media (for the public) and Verification Training for Journalists
● FirstDraftNews.org’s verification toolbox
● FirstDraftNews.org’s quick-start reading list for verifying online media
● FirstDraftNews.org’s Chrome extension, NewsCheck “prompts you to work through a
verification checklist and then allows others to see how you authenticated an image or video.”
With checklists for videos and images.
● First Draft’s 10 newsgathering and verification tools for newsrooms on a budget
● 5 lessons for reporting in an age of disinformation, by Dr. Claire Wardle of FirstDraftNews.org
● Social Newsgathering: A Collection of Storyful Blog Posts, an iBook edited by Claire Wardle,
with advice on “guides to verifying content online, how to build and manage Twitter lists, how to
use Tweetdeck effectively as a journalist, how to spot fake photographs, and how to geo-locate
videos on a map
● The Daily Quiz That Teaches Journalists How to Geolocate Images: “Once a day, the
@Quiztime Twitter account posts an image. By scouring the image for clues, the quiz players,
many of whom are journalists, try to figure out precisely where in the world it was taken.
● A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders
• NPR Ethics Handbook, Social Media guidelines, especially the Accuracy section.
● Poynter Institute’s free, 90-minute online course on NewsU: Hands-On Fact-Checking: A
Short Course
• Poynter Institute’s free 60-minute webinar replay on NewsU: Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to
Verify Everything Online from July 11, 2018
● Storyful.com’s resources, including blog, thought leadership, case studies and podcasts.
● Hoaxy “is a tool that visualizes the spread of articles online. Articles can be found on Twitter, or
in a corpus of claims and related fact checking.”
● Botometer (formerly BotOrNot) checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score
based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.
● 7 verification tools for better fact-checking from Reuters
• CitizenEvidence.org has case studies showing authentication techniques for human rights
researchers
• VerificationJunkie.com is “a growing directory of tools for verifying, fact checking and
assessing the validity of eyewitness reports and user-generated content.”
• Bellingcat’s online investigation toolkit. Bellingcat publishes the findings of investigations
by citizen journalists using online tools.
• The universe of people trying to deceive journalists keeps expanding and newsrooms
aren’t ready. from NiemanLab.org: “The problem for newsrooms is threefold: how to
identify sophisticated manipulations, how to educate audience without inducing apathy
and deepening mistrust, and how to keep the growth of this technology from casting doubt
on legitimate and truthful stories.”
• The ultimate guide to bust fake-tweeters: A video toolkit in 10 steps, by Henk van Ess for
Poynter.org, Oct. 4, 2017
• Emergent.info: A real-time rumor tracker