Fact Check for Viral Image in Two Clicks
Major news events like Hurricane Harvey generate thousands of photos and thousands more tweets and Facebook posts with fake, outdated, or out of context photos. This time, the most winning photoshop with a shark on the freeway , which appears during every strong hurricane.
Before you join over 68,000 people who have retweeted this fake photo, just spend two clicks to check it. In Chrome, right-click the image and choose Google Search for Image. And boom, see if there is a source or ten blog posts exposing this . BuzzFeed reporter Jane Litvinenko breaks this down into small steps:
And here’s a slightly longer process on mobile:
It hurts, but if you don’t, you will have to admit that you are more interested in the attention than in the truth. And when all your followers see that you have fallen for deception, they unsubscribe from you, as if from a dummy.
But you’re not a moron or hungry for attention, so check the facts before retweeting and no fake image ever goes viral again!
In the meantime, keep an eye on the Washington Post ‘s current list of Hurricane Harvey hoaxes or a similar list from BuzzFeed .
Update Aug 30, 9:30 am: Litvinenko pointed us to a simple mobile interface for searching Google reverse images (via Clayton Cubitt ). To find an image, simply save it to your camera roll and then go to this page to find it. On iOS, this is just an 11-tap process.