A lot of the information we encounter on a daily basis is visual, so a lot of the misinformation we
encounter is also visual. Images are one example. Images can be manipulated, used deceptively. Often
things that look real are photoshopped. Sometimes things that look photoshopped are real. In-context
photos are miscaptioned and misummarized constantly- it's practically a web tradition.
Now the good news is with a few simple steps you can often find the photo in its original context
and understand the meaning of the photo yourself. So let me
let me show you some quick steps to do this.
First let's look at this photo that went viral back in March. It's a dolphin and some fish
swimming in the water which might make a nice photo on its own but it's accompanied by a pretty
shocking claim the water of Venice has become so clear from the coronavirus lockdown that this
person claims, at least, that the dolphins have returned to the canals for the first time in 60
years. Now there's been lots of images and posts making similar claims. Maybe you've seen some of
these, the phrase "nature is healing" and a lot of the images and claims are true. But is this one,
real or fake? Now we could spend all day staring at this photo and trying to figure out if it's
been photoshopped but instead I'm going to show you a quick trick that will help us figure out if
a) the photo is real and b) if it's showing what it claims to show. And as you'll see in a moment,
these are really two separate but equally important questions. Now
just like we did with text we can search images in Google to get additional context.
We just right click on the image and select "search Google for image." If you're using a
mobile device just press the image and hold and select "search Google for image." Now, in this
case we get lucky, sort of, right? There's lots of stories here that seem to repeat this claim,
but the most credible source on the page, National Geographic, a magazine in the society that looks
at precisely these sorts of stories, seems to feature the photograph in a story that implies
this is false. So we we click on the article we use our CTRL-F to quickly search for "dolphin"
and see if we can learn more about this image. In this case we learned that the
photos are real but they weren't taken in Venice. Reading further we can see that the
reporter has already done the hard work for us. They've traced these images back to their source.
Often when images go viral we can count on professional journalists and fact-checkers
to do the work of establishing proper context for us and that turns out to be the situation here.
Once in a while, though, you'll have to do the work yourself. For example, here's a photo from
an anti-lockdown protest showing protesters holding signs that say things like "defund
science," "defend my right to die" and, again, we could spend hours debating whether this image was
photoshopped and staring at the pixels or we can do a quick search and see if we can learn more
about the source of this image. For this example we'll use a site called TinEye. TinEye works
in every browser. It's a good alternative if you're not using Chrome. In this case we can
right click the image select 'copy image address' and then we go to TinEye. We right click on the
toolbar press "paste" and hit return. Here we see a list of other places where this image
has appeared. Now look at this: Snopes. Snopes is already up the top with an article from yesterday.
This is actually new from last time I looked at it, but we could do this even if Snopes wasn't
there yet. We see that NBC news, a reputable organization has used the image recently and
we click into the NBC News link. It brings us to a story from April 20th about how Facebook has been
removing events and here's our photo right at the top with a caption giving us the original context:
protest, Colorado, April 19th. So the photo is from a protest, but notice that the content of
the signs is not what was in the photo from the tweet. The photo in the tweet was photoshopped,
but we figured that out by using some simple tricks to find the original source
not by doing pixel-level analysis, not by looking for signs of manipulation.