How-to: Reverse image search

Posted on by FactCheckNI

Take a brief moment to check viral images online before you share them. This can help stop the spread of misinformation/disinformation. There are many online search engines and tools which will point to the origins of images you see on social media channels and elsewhere on the web. As fact checkers these are often our “go to” tools when considering an image. 

Images are a quick, easy, and shareable way to communicate a message online. At FactCheckNI we often see them  reappear some time later because of a renewed interest in the topic that the image is associated with. We also see them used out of context (e.g. a different time and/or place) in misleading ways.

Here’s a worked example of how we checked an image that was widely shared.  Continue reading How-to: Reverse image search

Checking online images in Northern Ireland

Posted on by FactCheckNI

In Northern Ireland, where political, social and economic debate is often delineated along lines of perceived communal affiliation, false information and rumours have the potential to increase communal division and tensions, especially at particular times of the year. 

Images play a big part in the types of information shared online here, and it is sometimes difficult to figure out whether an image on the internet is genuinely what it claims to be. There’s a “stickiness” to images, and they can communicate and infer so much more than a 280 character tweet. To paraphrase the old saying — a fake/misleading image can make its way halfway around Northern Ireland, while the accurate information is still putting on its shoes! 

So what can we do? Many of us feel we are not tech savvy or simply do not have the time to check every image we see online or receive via WhatsApp. Continue reading Checking online images in Northern Ireland

How-to: Wayback Machine

Posted on by FactCheckNI

FactCheckNI How-to
Wayback Machine

Websites and their pages come and go. From a researcher’s perspective, it can be frustrating when you’ve cited a particular website page, only to discover later that it has been removed by the publisher or is otherwise no longer available. An American non-profit organisation, Internet Archive, launched a product in 2001 called Wayback Machine, which is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. Continue reading How-to: Wayback Machine