Presentation by Jochen Spangenberg (DW) held at EBU (European Broadcasting Union) fact-checking and verification workshop on 25 June 2019 in Geneva

1. Research and Results of (our) Work in the Verification Sphere
EBU Verification / Factchecking Workshop
Geneva, 25 June 2019
Jochen Spangenberg
Deutsche Welle, Research and Cooperation Projects
jochen.spangenberg@dw.com
Twitter: @jospang
Source: Manipulated image of an apparent Iranian missile testSource: Screenshot Truly Media Source: Screenshot of InVID / WeVerify Plug-in

2. Source: Alexios Mantzarlis, IFCN at Poynter, March 2017 (original tweet here)
Fact-checking vs verification

3. Source: screenshots of selected works / efforts carried out by REVEAL consortium
Algorithm-supported verification (11/2013-12/2016)
Areas of work:
• Verification tools
• Social media analysis
• Geo-tools
• Influencer analysis
• Verification workflows
• Checklists for journalists
• Market research
• Legal investigations
• …
More on http://revealproject.eu/ & @RevealEU

4. “Let‘s verify
together!“
● Collaborative web-based verification
● Organising individual tasks
● Workflow integration
● Internal / external tool integration
● Easy sharing of output / results
● Transparency

5. Source: screenshots of selected works / efforts carried out by InVID consortium
Research project inVID with a focus on video verification (01/2016-12/2018)
Areas of work:
• Workflow analysis & support
• Develop (part)automated
verification to/for :
- Detect manipulations
- Logo detection
- Forensics
- Image recognition &
classification
• Legal aspects / rights clearance
• Benchmark analysis
• ....
More on http://www.invid-project.eu/ & @InVID_EU

6. WeVerify (12/2018 – 11/2021)
Mehr auf https://weverify.eu/ & @WeVerify

7. Digger aims to detect tampering of video by using state-of-the-art audio forensics technologies;
• Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) analysis,
• encoding analysis,
• microphone analysis,
• audio segment matching.
Digger furthermore plans to integrate outcomes in a video verification tool/interface, featuring;
• full screen player,
• frame by frame viewing,
• digital zoom enhancement,
• key frame extraction,
• metadata analysis,
• annotation, etc.
Solutions are to be made available to verification experts via API or via integration in Truly Media.
Digger (07/2019 – 07/2021)

8. Let’s take a closer look at
a) the InVID / WeVerify verification plug-in
(VERIFICATION)
b) Truly Media: a platform for collaborative verification
(Verification and COLLABORATION)

9. Source: screenshot InVID plug-in. Here: Thumbnail reverse search.
Features (of earlier version) explained: see https://youtu.be/nmgbFODPiBY
The InVID “verification plug-in”
• Free of charge
• Browser extension for
- Chrome
- Firefox
• Various features / functionalities
• More than 14,000 downloads to
date / more than 3.000 users
(May 2019), mainly journalists
and human rights workers
• Very positive feedback

10. Source: screenshot InVID / WeVerify plug-in, release of June 2019
Relaunch / newest version of 5 June 2019 (now InVID – WeVerify)

11. The InVID/WeVerify “Verification Plug-in” – “getting ready”
(“contextual menu”)
• Install plug-in
• Right click on image
• Go!
This allows you to trigger the plugin on a still image or a YouTube video link.
Image: A right click will propose you to either open the picture in the image magnifier to examine it more closely, or to launch a variety
of reverse image search engines
Video: a right click lets you trigger either an InVID video analysis or the Youtube thumbnail reverse search (if it is a a Youtube video).

12. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Analysis Tab
The Analysis tab allows you to query the context
aggregation and analysis service
The service is an enhanced metadata viewer for Youtube,
Facebook (public videos) and Twitter videos that allows
you to retrieve contextual information, location (if
detected), most interesting comments, apply reverse
image search, and check for tweets on the video (on
Youtube). For Facebook, you need to be logged in to be
able to process their links.
NB: Be aware that the service may take some time if the
video processed has a lot of comments. A new feature (a
reprocess button) allows you to refresh the analysis.
Integrated reverse image searches: Google, Yandex,
Tineye. Plus Twitter video searches.

13. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Keyframe Tab
The Keyframe tab is an iframe opening the
website of Thessaloniki Information Technologies
Institute (ITI) on video fragmentation.
It allows you to copy a video url (from Youtube,
Twitter, Facebook, Daily Motion or Dropbox) or to
upload a video file (in mp4, webm, avi, mov, wmv,
ogv, mpg, flv, and mkv format) in order to segment
it in keyframes which then can be searched with a
right click in image search engines such as
Google, Yandex, Tineye, Bing, Karma Decay (for
Reddit) and Baidu images.
The service extracts more keyframes and
therefore gives the opportunity to enhance the
video reverse image search.
Note: Those are the real keyframes of the video,
not the thumbnails served by Youtube or
Facebook.

14. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Thumbnails Tab
The Thumbnails tab allows you to quickly
trigger a reverse image search on Google,
Bing, Tineye or Yandex Images with the four
thumbnails that are extracted (automatically,
and often randomly) by YouTube from a
YouTube video.
Up to four tabs (according to the number of
thumbnails available) are opened automatically
in your browser per search engine, while the
four thumbnails are also displayed in the plugin
page.
NB: This tab is somewhat redundant with what
can be done with the Analysis tab, but it is
very fast and efficient if you just need to look
whether a YouTube video has already been
published previously.
NB 2: the Chinese search engine Baidu is not
implemented here because it is filtering out
YouTube content.

15. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Twitter Search Tab
The Twitter Search tab allows to enhance a
Twitter advanced search for keywords or
hashtag using the ‘since’ and ‘until’ operators,
either separately or together, to query within a
time interval, up to the minute.
It translates automatically the calendar date,
hour and minutes into a unix timestamp to
facilitate the query, e.g. of first eyewitness
pictures or videos within a time range just after
a breaking news event.
We have also added other features from
Twitter’s ‘advanced search’ such as ‘geocode’,
‘near’, ‘from’, ‘language’ and various filter
operators.

16. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Magnifier Lens Tab
The Magnifier lens tab allows you to display an
image through its url or via upload, and to zoom or
apply a magnifying lens on the image, or/and to
enhance it through a bicubic algorithm to help you
discover implicit knowledge such as written words,
signs, banners ...
You can also “flip” (mirror) the image.
Either enter the image url, upload an image from your
local drive with the local file button, or drag and drop
an image in another tab within your browser and copy
and paste the local url.
Once the image is displayed from a url, you can also
perform a reverse image search on Google, Yandex,
Tineye and Baidu on it, or use the Image forensic
service designed by ITI and DW in the Reveal
European project.
If you are using a local image or you have modified
any image (sharp, flip, bicubic), you can either
download your modified image or copy a new url to
paste it in a Google images tab which opens in your
browser. This feature also supports links of stored
images in Dropbox and Google drive.

17. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Metadata Tab
The Metadata tab allows you to
check the Exif metadata of a picture
in jpeg format or metadata of a
video in mp4/m4v format, either
through a link or through a local file.
If geo-coordinates are available in
the picture’s metadata, a
‘geolocalise’ button (then displayed
at the bottom) is provided and – by
clicking – automatically draws in the
geo-coordinates and points to the
location on Google Maps for cross-
checking the location.

18. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Video Rights Tab
The Video Rights tab allows you to check and negotiate
the rights of the video under examination.
It requires a separate registration to the service. The idea
is to make re-use of videos comply with existing rules and
regulations, and agree usage rights with copyright holders.
This service gets a link to a YouTube, Facebook or Twitter
video and retrieves metadata about its rights, unless
access is restricted by the content uploader or the social
network. First of all it provides the user with a summary of
the reuse conditions, as defined by the social network the
video is published in. If other reuses are intended, it is
recommended to contact the content uploader. This can
be done directly or under the guidance of the InVID Rights
Management Tool. The latter facilitates contacting the
uploader, confirming authorship, or managing the
negotiation of the reuse conditions. Alternatively, the Video
Rights tab includes information about copyright exceptions
if it is not possible to get consent from the author, as the
use by the press exception or fair use/fair dealing.

19. InVID/WeVerify Plug-in Components: The Forensics Tab
The Forensic tab is an iframe
opening the still images
forensic service developed
by Thessaloniki Information
Technologies Institute (ITI)
and Deutsche Welle in the EU
co-funded project Reveal.
It applies a variety of forensic
analyses to an image.
There’s also a “slider” to focus
on potential areas of
manipulations.
Explainers are also provided
in order to (sort of) understand
what the varying analyses
have found out, and how to
interpret them

20. Source: screenshot of tweet by Claire Wardle, First Draft News, 31 May 2019

21. … in more detail
Source: Ruben Bouwmeester

22. Truly Media: a collaborative, web-based platform for verification

23. 1: Find content

24. 2: Organise content

25. 3: Verify digital content together und transparently

26. Quelle: Twitter Post von Bofa Deez, aka @Herman_Dayz vom 2. Okt. 2017
Example: Las Vegas shooting, Oct 2017

33. Source: Eva Lopez
At Deutsche Welle
Truly Media: Day-to-day usage
At Amnesty International‘s Digital
Verification Corps (DVC) /
Crisis Respoonse Team
Source: DW
EU Observatory against Disinformation New on board: ZDF

34. Jochen Spangenberg
Deutsche Welle,
Research & Cooperation Projects
Twitter: @jospang
EBU, Geneva, 25 June 2019