tool
Let's start with a diagram. On December 8, 2021, an Air Force Mi-17V5 helicopter crashed inside the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Fourteen passengers on board, including Bipin Rawat, india's defense chief of staff at the time, were killed. After the accident, in a short period of time, a number of pictures began to circulate on the Chinese, British and Indian networks, claiming to be photos of the crash site of the plane.
The image shown here is one of them, which has been widely circulated on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and other platforms. In the picture, a green military helicopter crashed on the side of the river beach, surrounded by armed personnel. But is it really a photo of Rawat riding the plane crash site?
The pictures of the crash scene of Rawat's plane are actually news photos from 2019.
In fact, this so-called live photo has appeared as early as 2019. On October 24, 2019, a Polaris helicopter developed by Hindustan Airlines (HAL) with the assistance of the former German company MBB crashed in Kashmir due to a "technical failure", and the aircraft was loaded with the then commander of India's Northern Military District, Lambir Singh. Fortunately, all 9 people on board, including the commander, survived and suffered only minor injuries.
So, how do we know that this online map of the Mi-17V5 helicopter crash site is actually a transfer of flowers and trees? By extension, in the era of media, we will always unconsciously encounter various visual information on the Internet. When a picture with captions appears in front of us, how do we judge the accuracy of the information conveyed by the picture?
"Mingcha" here introduces a simple but extremely practical fact-checking tool called reverse image search. The so-called "reverse" is relative to the "forward" image search - that is, the way to enter keywords in the search box and then find the corresponding picture. Reverse search is a way to find pictures by diagram and text by diagram. It is extremely simple to operate, taking only three steps. Here we take the Google Image Search Tool as an example:
Step 1: Download the picture you see, save it to your local computer (if it is inconvenient to download the picture, you can sometimes save it by means of a screenshot), or copy the link (url) of the picture.
Step 2: Open the Google Image search interface and click on the small logo shaped "Camera" on the search bar. Use the copy image link or upload locally to upload the downloaded image to the interface.
Step 3: Find the information you are interested in in the search results, especially when the picture appeared, whether it has been reported by other media, the context of the use of the picture, etc.
The power of reverse image search is that it can help us quickly determine whether a picture has appeared before and its possible provenance, thus saving a lot of time for fact-checkers to search and judge. Here we take a picture that "Mingcha" once verified that claims to show the Afghan Taliban "meeting to celebrate 100 days of rule" as an example, to show you the specific application of this tool, interested readers may wish to follow the tutorial and experience it for themselves.
Case
In November 2021, a picture circulated on the Chinese's internet with the caption "The Afghan Taliban regime celebrates 100 days in power." In the picture, five men stand side by side, wrapped in headscarves, wearing burqas, and pooping on a large belly. This graph does not show when, where the Celebration was celebrated, or the identities of the participants. What is quite remarkable is that the men suspected of being "high-ranking Taliban officials" in the picture have prominent abdomen, as if to imply that the Taliban, who have seized power in Kabul without bloodshed, are happy in the city.
Screenshot of Weibo.
To verify the authenticity of this message, you can start with the picture. The first step is to get the corresponding image. We can click on the image in the message, enlarge it and right-click to "save the image as" to local.
Right-click "Save As" to save the relevant image locally.
The second step is to open Google Pictures, click the "Camera" logo in the search bar, select "Upload Image" in the pop-up search box, click "Select File" to upload the downloaded and saved image.
Once the image is uploaded, we will find a series of information that Google has compiled for us with relevant images. We need to carefully screen this information to see if the time and context of the uploaded image appearing on the Internet is different from the online message, and it is best to see if the different sources can be cross-corroborated. This is the third step in reverse image search.
Going back to this example, among the many results given by Google Search, we can find an article published by the Jerusalem Post on February 19, 2021, in which this image was used.
Below the image, there are three lines of captions showing Patrick Semansky, a photojournalist hired by The Associated Press, showing Taliban negotiators meeting Pompeo in Doha, Qatar, on November 21, 2020.
If we search further on Google for images that say information-related content, we can see records or reports of the relevant meetings on the U.S. State Department website and NBC. On November 21, 2020, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with a Taliban delegation in Qatar and asked him about the mortar attacks that occurred in Kabul that day, NBC said. The same photo taken by Semansky was used in the report.
From this, we can conclude with relative certainty that the picture of the Afghan Taliban "meeting to celebrate 100 days of rule" circulated on the Internet is actually the scene of the Taliban negotiators meeting with Pompeo last year, when the Afghan Taliban did not control the Afghan capital Kabul at all, and the so-called "100 days in power" cannot be talked about. In addition, "Mingcha" used other picture identification methods, and also found that the abdomen of the person in the original picture had obvious traces of P size, so this message was really a false message that was maliciously spread.
So far we have successfully completed a reverse image search. In fact, in addition to Google search, the reverse search tools commonly used by fact-checkers also include Bing, Tineye, Yandex, Baidu Zhitu, etc. "Mingcha" first verified the "Atta celebrates 100 days of rule" message with the Tineye tool. Different image search tools have their own suitable verification scenarios. Interested readers may wish to leave a message below, "Mingcha" may be able to come up with some advanced tutorials in the future to communicate with you.
Finally, in order to help everyone test whether they have really mastered the skills of "picture anti-search", "Mingcha" also carefully selected two "exercises" for everyone, and the following two pictures have been widely disseminated on major social platforms at home and abroad. Please try to find the source of the following pictures by using the reverse image search method, and then check the link article below the image to see if the search results are accurate.
Click here to see the answer
Further reading:
Fact-checking | "Onion News" and satire, don't take it seriously
Fact-checking | start with three questions from the Stanford History Education Group