DATE

For any piece of content, sort search results chronologically and replicate the keyword searches across platforms – Do you have the earliest instance of the video?

Use reverse image search on thumbnails, key frames, on-screen logos, etc. Look for earlier versions of the video, or old reports about a similar incident from which the video may be taken.

Do reverse image search or analyse image metadata with:

• Google Image Search – on the web or use Chrome extension
• RevEye – Chrome extension allowing cross-platform image searching
• TinEye
• Jeffrey’s Image Metadata Viewer

You can review metadata on a social video with:

Amnesty International DataViewer

InVid

Consider also the number of views, the upload time, the quality of the footage, and the uploader’s username and profile picture. Are the contents, the uploader, the quality consistent with what you’d expect?

If there are no earlier versions, look for hints about when the video was taken: do the weather, time of day, comments made by people in the video, etc, tally with the stated date of the clip? Does the content of the media match reports from independent, trusted sources?