Validating facts

Not everyone online is who they claim to be, and not every “news” is real. You can’t verify everything, but a few simple habits catch the large majority of fakes.

The core idea: don’t trust a single source — confirm it from an independent one.

Checking a person

Before believing a profile belongs to a real person:

  1. Reverse-search their photo. Upload the avatar to a reverse image search. If the same face appears under different names, or it is a stock/AI-generated picture, walk away.

  2. Look at the account’s age and history. A brand-new account, or one with no ordinary day-to-day activity, is a red flag. Real people leave a long, messy trail; fakes are usually thin and recent.

  3. Check for consistency. Do the stated location, language, working hours and details add up? Contradictions are a strong signal.

  4. Move to another channel. Ask to talk on a different platform, or to do a short live video call. A scammer or bot usually finds an excuse to refuse.

Checking a claim or “news”

  1. Find the original source. Trace the story back to who first reported it. Screenshots and forwards are easy to fabricate; the primary source is harder to fake.

  2. Cross-reference. If something important really happened, more than one independent outlet will report it. A claim that exists in only one place deserves suspicion.

  3. Check the date and context. Old photos and videos are constantly recycled as if they were new. Reverse-search the image and check when it first appeared.

  4. Beware of emotion. Fakes are engineered to make you angry or scared so you share before thinking. The stronger your reaction, the more it is worth slowing down to verify.

A note on AI

Text, voices, photos and even video can now be generated convincingly. This doesn’t make verification hopeless — it just means content alone is no longer proof. Confirmation now comes from independent channels and consistent history, not from how real something looks. The limits of this are covered in Limits of faking.