Photo Credit: Pixabay/TheHillaryClark
When it comes to images and videos, can you trust your own eyes?
In a word, no.
Because we are more likely to believe something we can see for ourselves, photographs and videos can present an especially big problem when it comes to fake news. Modern technology makes it is easy to manipulate photographs and video, as in the following example, which was widely covered by news outlets. Digital artist Adam Padilla recently posted a photograph to Twitter of “Monster Energy Ham.” Padilla, who goes by Adam.The.Creator, is well known for creating fake products. However, that didn’t stop the meme from circulating on social media and left some wondering if Monster had gotten into the lunch meat business. Snopes.com quickly debunked the rumor.
Perhaps even more problematically, people often share images and videos with the wrong context or background information. For example, photographs of one event have been misrepresented as depicting a different event to stoke outrage or fuel a particular agenda.
Snopes.com, a fact-checking site, recently debunked a series of images that some social media users claimed showed Mexican police officers who were injured during skirmishes with a caravan of migrants headed towards the United States. These images were shared in a Facebook group with more than 6,000 members. The images were even shared by some political pundits, such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. While the photographs were real, they had nothing to do with the migrant caravan. In fact, the pictures were taken between 2011 and 2014. They depict various altercations between police and student protestors.
Videos can be similarly manipulated or used out of context.
In order to determine the veracity of an image or video:
Ask yourself what you know about the photographer or videographer. Is there a person credited for this image? Is this person a professional photographer or filmmaker? You should be able to find a history of his or her work at this or other publications. If not, is the image or video being published by a professional news outlet that would have done the work of verifying the content and creator? If not, has this person published other images or videos on the platform or on social? Check to see if the content of those images matches up with the image or video in question. For example, do the other images reveal that he or she would have been working in the area where the news occurred?
Look for clues in the image or video. If the image claims to be of a protest in Minneapolis, but you see palm trees in the background of the photograph, that should give you pause. This photograph may depict a different event than the one described in the article. If a reputable news outlet uses an image that does not exactly match the story, it will clearly note of that in the caption. For example, if an article about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s re-election contains a photograph from his original mayoral campaign, the caption will directly state that.
Do a reverse search for the image using Google. Right-click on the picture or drag it into the google images search bar to look for previous uses of the photo. If you see this same photograph being used in stories about many different events or topics, there’s a good chance that the image is not actually related to the story at hand. InVID has developed a plug-in for Chrome and Firefox that performs a similar function for videos.