After completing this lesson you will be able to:
• Describe different types of problematic content that have fooled newsrooms and audiences in the past
• Find clues in visual content shared online by practicing your observation skills
• Investigate the provenance of a video, by checking whether you are looking at a copy
• Explain the challenges surrounding ‘scraped’ content online and
• Use the First Draft verification checklists for video and images

When attempting to verify a piece of content, you need to investigate 5 elements:
• Provenance: Are you looking at the original piece of content?
• Source: Who created the piece of content?
• Date: When was the piece of content captured?
• Location Where was the piece of content captured?
• Motivation: Why was the piece of content captured?

As the previous checklist shows, verification is a process. There isn’t one verification tool that will give you a definitive conclusion. Instead, you need to use a number of different tools and techniques to investigate different elements of any social media post, image or video.

These checks will help you to decide where you feel confident enough to share a piece of content. There will be times when you are 100% certain you are looking at an original piece of content, but only 60% certain of when and where it was captured.

Once these verification checks are carried out, it is important to be transparent with others about what you know and what you don’t.