2. Who is the author?

1. To determine the identity of the author, do a quick Google search on the emails found in bullet 1. Use WebMii to see all their links, including their photo.
2. Find out which social networks they use and what they post on them or gather more information using SocialSearcher.
3. Determine if the author is a human, a bot or a troll and make a sociogram of their Twitter connections.

ℹ Fake profile detection marks.
If the author seems legitamate, proceed to step 3.

3. What is the message?

1. Review the headlines for low quality and sensational hoaxes. Are there spelling mistakes?
2. Check the text for uniqueness or use the form below.
3. Is the news story signed by the author?
4. Are any used sources cited? If so, what type are they?
5. What do experts say about this?

ℹ Guidelines for using plagiarism tools.
If a site publishes stolen content, we should not trust it, but on the other hand with the help of such tools we can determine where the source of the content comes from and how much it has been modified.

4. Are the photos provided legitimate?

1. Do a reverse image search for similar images on the web to see the first date of publication by pasting the URL of the photo into the form below:
    

   Google Images Bing View Yandex
2. Examine the image, see if there are unnatural proportions, colors or questionable details. With Image Verification Assistant and FotoForensis you can check if technical corrections have been applied to falsify the image and view the EXIF information of the file.
3. Cross reference the image with other sources that confirm its location and time. Look for numbers, signs, terrain, clothing. Identify inconsistent details.

ℹ A quick guide to image validation.

5. Are the video clips provided legitimate?

1. Analyze the media context of the video in InVID Analysis. With the form below, you can extract multiple images from a video and do a reverse search on them to identify the origin.
2. Take a look at the account from which the video was posted and the comments below it. Check if the video has a description, other social media accounts linked to it; and if they have a difference with the metadata file using Metadata2go.
3. Investigate more YouTube video channels by keyword with SocialBlade and see if some related information can be found in them.
4. Analyze the available information, the weather, time and place of the video.

ℹ How to use fake video detection tools

6. When and Where?

1. We can check if we are being lied to about the location of the event by looking at how it looks on Google Earth and Google Earth и Street View.
2. Check what the weather was on the date given using WoframAlfa or use this link.
3. Decode the photographed text with an OCR.
4. Check the location of the author’s found IP
5. We can turn the time back in the internet using Archive.org.

7. Why was it published?

Analyze the collected information and answer the following questions:

❶ Are the author and the source reliable according to bullets 1 and 2? - "YES" or "NO"
❷ Did you find any signs of tampering according to bullets 3-5? - "NO" or "YES"
❸ Did you see any evidence of tampering the weather, the time or the location according to bullet 6? - "NO" "YES"

Train your ability to recognize fake faces. Which face is real?