A comment on my fact-check about the 'lost city' video made me rethink image verification

Last month I posted a breakdown of that viral clip claiming to show a 'lost city' found in the Amazon. I used reverse image search and it came up clean, so I called it plausible. A user named 'GeoVerify' commented, 'You only checked the stills. The cloud movement in the background of the video loop is identical every 7 seconds. It's a CGI asset.' I went back and checked frame by frame, and they were right. I was only looking for copied photos, not analyzing the video file itself. Now I always run videos through a metadata checker and look for repeating patterns before I even start on the story. It added about 20 minutes to my process, but it catches way more fakes. Has anyone else had a basic check fail them and had to add a new step?

3 comments

3 Comments

holly70924d ago

Totally been there. I used to just check if a photo was online already. Missed a fake where someone mirrored the left side of a real disaster photo to make it look bigger. Now I always flip the image horizontally myself to check for perfect symmetry. It's a dead giveaway for lazy editing.

lucasw8424d ago

Adding 20 minutes to check every video seems like a lot of work for a clip of some trees and clouds. Most people just scroll past that stuff anyway.

zara_sanchez24d ago

Yeah, the "trees and clouds" stuff is exactly what gets through... I run a quick reverse image search on a cropped section, like just the sky. It takes two minutes and catches a lot of reused backgrounds.