DIY Fact-Checking Tips

At least, that’s what a headline circulating social media in 2014 claimed. The story, complete with supposed quotes from NASA’s chief scientist, included a clear picture of a fish fossil surrounded by ruddy Martian minerals. After decades of speculation, had scientists finally uncovered rock-solid evidence of life on other planets?

Enough people apparently believed it that a well-known fact-checking website soon published an investigation of the story. Such exposés are often helpful for sorting truth from lies. However, previous blog posts have explained how in the long run, learning how to think presents a more effective (and potentially less Orwellian) solution to “fake news” than always being told what to think.

On that note, let’s explore some tools professional fact-checkers and investigative journalists use to verify information. That way, we’ll see how everyday people can combine these tools with basic biblical critical thinking skills to fact-check messages themselves.

“Fake News” and the 7 Checks of Critical Thinking

To start, here’s a quick recap of 7 Checks of Critical Thinking you can use to break down any message—including potential “fake news:”1

1. Check Scripture. Ask, “What does the Bible say about this topic?”2 For instance, the idea of life on other planets doesn’t match well with biblical teachings, so we immediately know there’s something “fishy” about the Mars fossil claim.
2. Check the challenge. Ask, “Does this message contradict a clear teaching from Scripture?” Say, for example, that a headline implicates a Christian leader in underhanded business dealings. While this news would be sad if accurate, the fact that Christians can behave unbiblically does not challenge the Bible’s truth.
3. Check the source. Ask, “Where does this information come from, and is it being reported accurately?” Tracking down original information sources, examining source reliability, and, if possible, speaking to sources directly are all key steps in investigative journalism. (Note: you can find tips for verifying reports about “what studies show” in this article.)
4. Check the definitions. Ask, “How are keywords being used in this message? Do their meanings change?” This step helps you catch logical mistakes, including equivocation and no true Scotsman fallacies.
5. Check for propaganda. Ask, “Why does this message sound persuasive, and are those factors relevant to whether the message is true?” For instance, is a news story true because it’s been widely shared on social media or raises strong emotions? Not necessarily.
6. Check the interpretations. Ask, “Which parts of this message are facts from observational science, and which parts are assumptions, speculations, or historical science interpretations? Does another explanation make even more sense of the relevant facts?” (Note: for related examples of how the media may misrepresent facts and harness propaganda, see this article.)
7. Check the logic. Ask, “Are there any other fallacies in this message?” Common logical errors to watch out for include straw man arguments, motte-and-bailey arguments, faulty either-or claims, and formal fallacies.

These checks will give you a better sense of whether a news story is (at least partially) worth believing. To supplement these steps in today’s digital information age, a few investigative journalism tools can help with verifying photos, websites, and videos. Let’s take a look.

Verifying images

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words—and a thousand words can encapsulate many a lie. For instance, real images can be angled, cropped, or cherry-picked to only tell part of a story. Photos captured at one time or location can be recaptioned (or otherwise taken out of context) to seem related to something else. Even scenes from commercials, artwork, or movies may be marketed as “breaking news.” And none of these tactics involve physically altering or photoshopping images—a step which unlocks endless other truth-twisting possibilities.

Some photos can be extremely tricky or time-consuming to verify, even for professional fact-checkers. But the average person can still detangle many a digital deception with a few handy tools. Online resources for journalists explain these techniques in much more detail, but here’s a quick introduction:

• Ideally, checking into an image will involve speaking with the person who took it.3 That’s not always possible, however. And even when the source is available, you’re wise to follow up with some verification steps of your own.
• The first step to verifying a photo is to run a reverse image search, which involves searching the internet using a photo rather than keywords. Various search engines and online tools offer this feature,4 letting you upload an image or paste its URL5 into a search box to see if similar photos exist elsewhere on the web.6 This step can quickly reveal if a “news” photo came from an earlier, unrelated context. It can also help you track down original pieces of photoshopped images or find related photos showing a broader context than the first image disclosed.
• You can sometimes confirm when (and even where) a picture was taken by viewing the image’s metadata—information embedded in photos from digital devices.7 While social media platforms generally strip this information from images, metadata may otherwise include the date, time, and GPS coordinates where the image was taken, as well as information about the device which captured the photo. You can access metadata through free online EXIF9 viewers.
• To help verify time and location, look for clues like landmarks, business names, street signs, licence plates, patterns of shadows and light that hint at the time of day,10 and weather conditions which can be checked against meteorological reports for where and when the photo allegedly originated. You can also compare the photo to other pictures or satellite images of the reported location.

If there’s nothing else to go on, fact-checkers may painstakingly trace the photo through social media or browse online databases to find the original image (or pieces of it) manually. Often, however, misleading photos readily succumb to the tools above combined with a little biblical critical thinking.

Verifying Videos

Many of these techniques for verifying photos also apply to verifying videos. After all, videos just consist of multiple photos strung together.

In our fallen, lie-riddled world, technology for manipulating videos is growing more advanced and accessible than ever. We’ll look further into fabricated videos (known as deepfakes) in an upcoming post. Meanwhile, here are a few tips for fact-checking videos:11

• Like photos, videos can be edited, trimmed, or taken out of context to mislead. Try tracking down the original footage by taking keywords from the video’s description, copying them into a search engine or social media platform, and filtering the results by date.
• You can also run reverse image searches on frames or thumbnails from videos to check if the footage has appeared online before. Some free video verification tools will even fragment footage into frames and reverse image search them across multiple databases.
• Other online tools allow you to analyze videos frame-by-frame. This lets you spot easy-to-miss inconsistencies like warped lines or irregular shadows, which may signal the video was manipulated.

Recent research confirms these techniques can help ordinary citizens—including youth—become savvier media consumers. For instance, one study documented the results of teaching students to think critically about potentially false visuals.12 Through two-hour classroom interventions, students in four European countries learned to reverse image search videos using a free verification tool popular among professional fact-checkers and journalists. The researchers reported a statistically significant improvement in students’ abilities to recognize false information without sacrificing trust in credible news.

Verifying websites

As these students discovered, not all news sources are created equal. Some websites even mimic legitimate news sites specifically to spread fabricated stories. What tell-tale clues can help us spot a suspicious website?

In a verification handbook written for investigative reporters, Canadian journalist Craig Silverman answers this question by describing a series of steps he uses to discern websites’ legitimacy.13 Here are a few tips based on his recommendations:

• Investigate the site’s content. For instance, is there a professional “about” section or other description of the site? Less-than-credible sites may include an “about” section to look polished; however, a complete lack of description can suggest the site was constructed hastily or for a purpose the owners prefer not to reveal.
• Look for social media links. Do they connect to real accounts or only to platforms’ homepages? Deceptive websites may well have social media accounts, but zero social media presence can indicate a hastily built site.
• Use internet archives to check how a website has appeared over time and which types of content it has published in the past.
• If the site claims to be a news source, you can copy its URL into the “news” sections of search engines to see if the website appears as a listed news site.
• If the website’s “about” section includes pictures of employees, you can run reverse image searches14 to check if the pictures depict “real” people or are merely stock photos.
• Copy text from the “about” section, main pages, or individual articles into a search engine to check whether identical wording exists on other websites. As Silverman notes, “If a company is using stock images for employees and plagiarized text on its site, you know it’s not what it claims to be.”15

Another tip is to check the website’s name, as some imposter sites will use similar names to legitimate news sites—but with a different domain (for instance, .net instead of .website). That’s what happened on the website which published the story of the “fish fossil on Mars.” The site’s name resembled that of a well-known news source, except that its address ended in .org instead of .com.

Catching Fishy “Facts”

In the end, we’ve seen how combining biblical critical thinking with a few professional fact-checking tools can help everyday people debunk false information themselves. For example, imagine how we could apply these tools to outsmart the Martian fish fossil hoax.

The Mars story fails Critical Thinking Check # 1, Check Scripture, right away, suggesting the fossil is not what the headline interprets it to be. For Check #3, Check the Source, we could investigate the website that published the story and spot its suspicious domain name. We’d also want to try tracking down the original information source the article supposedly quoted—in this case, NASA’s chief scientist. If we went to NASA’s website, we certainly wouldn’t find a press release corresponding to the Martian fossil “discovery.” We also wouldn’t find such reports on any other reputable site, even though a space fish would make a huge splash in the science news world.

If we still wanted to know where the “Martian fish” photo came from, we could run a reverse image search. When I tried this myself, the search results included a genuine NASA photo of Mars terrain. The picture looked identical to the “news story” image—rock for rock . . . except for the conspicuous absence of a photoshopped fossil.

As this example illustrates, a little DIY fact-checking based on biblical critical thinking tools can help everyday Christians wade through a world of lies—without getting hooked on fishy claims.