How to Fact-Check Like a Journalist with First Draft's Laura Garcia

Fact-checking isn’t just for professional journalists. With so much misinformation around COVID-19, how can you check the facts for yourself? Multimedia journalist Laura Garcia from First Draft walks us through how she fact-checked a viral video of an "escaped coronavirus patient" using free tools on the internet.

First Draft: https://firstdraftnews.org/

Resources
InVID video verification tool: https://www.invid-project.eu/
Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps
Google Image Search: https://www.google.com/imghp

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Take on Fake debunks claims you’ve seen or shared online to show you how to stay informed. Host Hari Sreenivasan follows the Internet rabbit hole of misinformation, reading beyond a single headline to find credible sources to uncover the truth.

#TakeOnFake

Hi, I'm Hari Sreenivasan.

Welcome to another episode
of TAKE ON FAKE,

where we'll try to debunk some
of the things you may have seen

or even shared online.

Did you see the video of the allegedly
escaped coronavirus patient in Italy?

It was dramatic.

A man being chased by men in hazmat suits

while he screamed "help!"
to stunned passersby.

So why did this go viral?

And how can you, as a viewer,
determine if it's real or if it's not?

For that, we turn to Laura Garcia.

She works with First Draft

and she works with journalists
all over the world

to help them verify what they find online.

So one of the most common
types of disinformation that we see online

are images and videos
that are not manipulated.

They haven't been doctored
or edited in any way.

They're just old or they're
taken out of context.

And I know this from the work
we do at First Draft.

So my initial thought was,

"Can we look for this video

and see if it's existed
on the Internet before?"

If you can walk me through this,

let me see what you're
looking at and what you did.

This is the original tweet
that we're talking about

and a couple of things
to look about at it.

So the writing in Arabic
says exactly the same thing as the tweet,

"an Italian corona patient
escaped from hospital."

Because I've got a friend
who speaks Arabic

and I asked him to translate real quick.

And the other thing
is that the person who shared it.

If we look at this person's account,

they have quite a lot of followers.

So I was actually concerned
that because this person shared it,

it has a big following,

a bunch of people were going to share it.

And I went to a plug-in called InVID.

So this is an amazing
kind of like all-solution plug-in,

and it has a bunch of tools
for journalists to use,

anything from looking
at YouTube thumbnails

or searching through Twitter.

And the one that I wanted
was this one that says analysis

because you can then take a link
from a video on Twitter or on YouTube,

and it does a little bit
of detective share looking on it.

So here, for example,

it gives me more information
about the account,

local time it was posted,

a bunch of more information

that I can use to kind of decide
whether the account is legit.

And then at the bottom here
is the magic trick -

it takes a thumbnail that I can
then reverse image search.

And this reverse image search
is where you can kind of ask the internet,

whether it's Google
or another search engine,

"Has something been uploaded
to the Internet before

with a thumbnail like this?

Can you find this online?"

So I searched across all of them,
and started to find it in other places.

So it's been on Twitter before.

Found it on TikTok.

Found it on 9GAG, a website that people
used to share memes and funny stuff.

So again, I was already thinking,
"Maybe this isn't true."

And the most important thing

is that I found versions of this video
dating back to even 2015.

OK, so that we did not have
coronavirus in 2015.

That's the big clue, right?

We did not have coronavirus.

So, for certain, I knew this had
nothing to do with coronavirus.

It was not from 2020.

Maybe we could have stopped there,

but I started to dig deeper
because you can, right?

So I eventually found this version
that looks like it was shared on Snapchat

because it has this strap
across the middle of it.

Yeah.

The important thing about this version

is that it's the best
resolution I could find.

And it means that if I blow it up,

I can actually read some of the street
signs and look for more clues.

Can we at least find out where it's from

and then verify the original
source that way?

So I started to look, for example,
this banner here at the back.

I don't know if you can see,

but it says "25c", kind of like
Americans write "cents."

I lived in the States a little while.

Thought maybe that's a clue.

You can see them run
past a car park in a corner,

then past a really colorful building,

which I thought, well,
that might be easy to find.

You can see the type of cars on the road.

A lot of American cars,
driving on the right side of the road.

Exactly. So you can start to, like,
eliminate by the process.

Definitely not the UK or somewhere
where they drive on the other side.

Definitely not Italy,
because Italian cars are really small.

These streets are so wide for Italy.

That is not it.

You can see the name of a business.

So that to me reads "D-M something
something U-N-I", like unisex -

like a hairdresser's or a hair salon.

But the kicker was this:

you can see this particular post
on that side that reads "Kean, K-E-A-N."

So what did I do?

What we all do when we have
a question - I went to the Internet.

You can see it's in Union, New Jersey.

And that's the logo that we're looking at.

So if you then type "union,
new jersey" into Google Maps ...

It's actually not a big town,
like a lot of college towns in the US.

So you have a couple of choices
of where to go from there.

What I chose to do
was to Google the business.

Businesses tend to be
listed on the Internet

because they want people to find them.

So I went back to the Internet

and typed in ...

"D'M" - because I could make that out -

"D'M Unisex Union New Jersey."

Eventually, if you scroll to the results,

you can find a Facebook account for
a business that is listed on this street:

D'Mauro's Unisex Hair Salon.

And you can see if we walk
through Street View,

hair salon is right there.

Hari: Wow!
Laura: And what not?

Colorful building on the corner!

So we know exactly where the video's from.

We know it's not from 2020.

We know it's not in Italy.

And it has nothing to do with coronavirus.

That's huge. So what was the video about?

Because it's been filmed
in a college town in the US,

and it's been shared on places like 9GAG
or other meme websites,

I'm kind of assuming some
college kids in the US thought

it would be really funny, and it was
a prank that got taken out of context.

But sometimes with this stuff,
you kind of just have to assume

as long as you know what something isn't,

that gives you the answers
that you were looking for.

In this age of misinformation,

it is crucial to have
the Laura Garcias out there,

who can corroborate the evidence
and debunk the myths

and just plain old check the facts
and show their work.

But we see so many
different types of information

that comes across
our social feeds all day long.

How do you know

that all of that has been put
to the same level of scrutiny?

What's the solution?

Well, become your own fact checker.

If something seems a bit off,
too good to be true,

almost looks like a Hollywood movie,

check the facts,

and maybe use some of the tools
that Laura showed us today.

Until next time. I'm Hari Sreenivasan.
Don't spread fake news. Keep it real.

Hey there, thanks for watching
this episode of TAKE ON FAKE.

If you want to see the tools
that Laura shared today,

they are in the description below.

Let us know what you think in the comments
and don't forget to subscribe

so you know when the next
episode of TAKE ON FAKE drops.