It is important to keep in mind the following before you begin verifying material:

1. Verification is a process.
2. There isn’t one verification tool that will give you a definitive conclusion. Instead, you need to use a number of different tools and techniques to investigate different elements of any social media post, image or video.
3. These checks will help you to decide where you feel confident enough to share a piece of content. There will be times when you are 100% certain you are looking at an original piece of content, but only 60% certain of when and where it was captured.
4. Once these verification checks are carried out, it is important to be transparent with others about what you know and what you don’t.

Think of verification as a jigsaw puzzle. Remember to ask yourself the following questions about content that you are trying to verify.

1. Provenance: Are you looking at the original piece of content?

a. If you’re not, you could be looking at a modified and/or manipulated version of the content.

b. Always ask the source to send you the original content.

c. Remember that even the original content’s metadata (EXIF data) could be deleted or modified.

d. A reverse search could return identical or similar media indexed online before the event in question took place.

2. Source: Who created this specific piece of content?

a. Remember this MIGHT not be the same person who uploaded the content, but the person who recorded the image/video, etc.

b. Try to find the persons’ contact information.

c. Triangulating the creator’s social accounts will help you ascertain if they could have created the content.

3. Date: When was this specific content captured?

a. Remember this is not when the content was viewed, retweeted or posted online, but when the image/video, etc. was recorded.

b. Look for shadows, the intensity of sunlight, weather conditions that can help confirm the time of capture.

c. Remember how timestamps and metadata are registered vary across social platforms.

4. Location: Where was the piece of content captured?

a. Never trust the location attached to a social post (across any platforms; these can easily modified by the uploader).

b. Always try to use an independent tool to identify the location

c. Try to confirm the location of the event by cross referencing with other media on social platforms.

d. There may be clear visual clues like names of places and people or landmarks, which will help you identify a location.

e. Determining exact latitudes and longitudes should always be a goal.

5. Motivation: Why was the piece of content captured?

a. Identify what was the role of the person who captured the footage. Were they an accidental eye-witness? Or maybe a bystander? Did they do it for social impressions?

b. If a username exists only on one platform with very few uploads, you may need to run more stringent tests to confirm authenticity.

The more answers you can find from the list above, the better informed you will be to judge the authenticity of a piece of content.