NLW-The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: Real or Altered?

Photo Fact-Checking in a Digital Age

Frog takes a trip during a NASA launch. Real? Or Altered?

1. First, ask some questions about the image? Where did you see it? Is it associated with a news story? Is there an image credit listed? If the image was of a famous person, can you find that specific image on the person’s verified social media accounts?
2. Next, dig deeper and do a reverse image search on the specific image using Google Images or TinEye.com. To do so, right click on the image and copy the image’s url by selecting either the option to Copy (Bing) or Copy Link Address (Chrome).
3. Go to Google’s image search, http://images.google.com, click on the camera icon that is inside the search box and paste the image’s url into the search box. A list of links where the image appears online will come on the screen.
4. On the website TinEye, https://www.tineye.com/, paste the image url in the search box to see links to where the specific image appears online.
5. If the image you searched for looks different from the images that appear in the links found by Google or TinEye, be suspicious of the content of the image you have.

Also, check out this informative video by the News Literacy Project’s Chicago program manager. The program manager walks viewers step-by-step through the process of determining the legitimacy of a photograph.

By the way, the NASA picture at the top of this page is real (Haskell, 2013).

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Sources:

• Haskell, J. (2013, September 12). Flying Frog Caught on Camera at NASA Moon Rocket Launch. Retrieved from: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nasa-rocket-launch-accidentally-lifts-frog-space/story?id=20237426
• Owen, M. (2014, June 10). Photo fact-checking in the digital age [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/Ewrx1lDhVPE