Armour for the digital age: Three easy tools to help you verify information in 2025

1. Context is everything: Google’s About this result

Google Search has built-in tools to help you find high-quality information and make sense of what you see online. We find the About this result feature especially useful, which gives valuable context about a web result, source or image. . Accessing these is as simple as clicking on the three dots next to a source or image you find in the search results page.

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Depending on what type of search result you’re looking at, you can find information such as how a site describes itself, as well as details about social media accounts and reviews. You can also often access archived snapshots of a website to see when it was first added to Google’s inventory. All of this information can help you decide whether to trust the search result.

Let’s look at an example. Disinformers have sometimes operated under the guise of a fact-checking organisation to gain trust. Imagine you come across an organisation, let’s say Africa Check, that claims to conduct fact-checking work in South Africa.

• Start by performing a Google search. When the results appear, click the three dots on the right of the result.

This will bring up a side panel. Here you can see what Africa Check says about itself, as well as a description of it (often from Wikipedia, under the heading About the source) and an explanation of how Google decided to show you that particular source (under Your search and this result).

Clicking More about this page opens another tab showing more context, in this instance the name of Africa Check’s founder, when the organisation was started, and an excerpt from the website. Clicking on social media icons lets you navigate to accounts associated with the organisation. Results for a Google search of the source’s name are then shown.

Further down, you can see the site was first indexed by Google more than 10 years ago, indicating that the organisation has likely been around for a while. (Note: This isn’t always the same as when an organisation or business was founded. Africa Check was started in 2012.)

Below that, you may find some images from the source’s site, along with an estimate of when they may have first appeared online. From here, you can click More about image to dive deeper.

Using About this image

Much of the false information we encounter daily is not edited or generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. More often, real images are presented inaccurately by claiming an old photo is recent or that it shows a different event or place. About this image can be a quick way to debunk this kind of trickery.

Let’s take this example of a photo showing a confrontation between police and protesters. If you had searched for this image online, you could click the three dots and navigate to About this image, which would show you where the photo appeared (for example, within news articles or fact-checks), and an estimate of when the photo first appeared online.

If someone posted the photo claiming it showed, say, a protest in the United States from the previous day, we could easily see that:

• The photo was first indexed by Google in November 2023.
• Multiple reputable news articles have used the photo, reporting on a protest in Cape Town, South Africa.
• More details about the event can be found in similar photos and videos results.

2. A time capsule: Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

You can think of this tool as a time machine, a giant library that captures and stores content on the internet at specific points in time. The Wayback Machine has saved over 916 billion web pages to date.

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It can be very helpful to see information that was removed from a site, or track the changes in a site over time. The Wayback Machine archive consists of pages users  have requested to be captured and the organisation’s own archiving efforts, so it doesn’t capture everything. If a page has been saved, you will be able to see, in varying detail, how it looked at particular points in its history.

This tool has many other features, and we’ll just explain the basics. For more depth, check out this video guide or these explanations of how to use the Wayback Machine.

How and why to use the Wayback Machine

To save content: If you come across something you suspect might be deleted in the future or just want to archive something to document it, you can click Save Page Now and optionally tick boxes to archive a screenshot of the page and outlinks. This saves the requested page, all pages linked to that page, and all embedded content. This can sometimes mean archiving hundreds of URLs at once.

If using the website version, paste the URL into the Save Page Now section.

To find content: Imagine a politician is accused of making a scandalous statement in an old video they uploaded to YouTube.

In a 2024 example from South Africa, footage of Renaldo Gouws, then a newly appointed member of parliament, making racist comments was reportedly found in the archive, long after it had been deleted from his YouTube channel. Though Gouws reportedly denied having made it and brushed it off as a deepfake, the archived video eventually led to his axing.

Let’s look at another example. In 2023, we investigated claims that teleconferencing platform Zoom’s terms allowed it to use customer data for training AI models. After public outcry, Zoom changed its terms to say it would not use data for this purpose, but the claim continued to circulate. We tracked these policy changes by comparing terms of service on the website over time. This is easy to do:

• Go to the Wayback Machine website or install the extension for your browser, and create an account. (Note: This is the method we’ll use here, but there are other ways to access and use the Wayback Machine.)
• Enter the URL of the website you want to investigate in the search bar, or
• If you have the browser extension installed, go to the website you’re investigating, navigate to the extension (usually in the top right corner of your browser – see below), and click it.
• Here, clicking the calendar icon will direct you to the dates and times of every capture linked to that URL. (Note: Instead of the calendar icon, clicking “oldest” or “newest” would direct you to the earliest or most recent captured version of the URL.)

• You can click the timestamp to view the archived version of the page – here, we can go to a snapshot of Zoom’s terms of service on 29 March 2024.
• To access more detail, play around with the other options listed, such as collections, changes, summary, site map, and URLs.

Note that the archive of a particular page or site will not always be complete. Some websites also block the Wayback Machine from archiving their publicly accessible content.

3. Speedy video debunks: InVid and WeVerify’s verification plugin

This tool has a range of features designed to help verify images, videos and social media posts. For our purposes, we’ll look at one way of using it to verify a video circulating on social media.

How and why to use InVid and WeVerify

Let’s take the example of a video we fact-checked in the lead-up to theSouth African 2024 elections, which claimed to show US rapper Eminem endorsing an opposition political party. It looked like old footage that had been manipulated in some way, so we used the verification plugin to find out more. Here’s how to do this:

• Install the InVid and WeVerify verification plugin. (Available as an extension on various browsers. Here’s the version if you use Chrome.)
• Go to the webpage showing the (publicly accessible) image or video you want to investigate.
• While on that page, go to your browser extensions. (If using Chrome, extensions are usually in the top right corner, and the plugin is called “Fake news debunker”.)
• Select the relevant option. It can be useful to select Assistant for current page, which will recommend tools appropriate for the content on that page.

• This will direct you to recommended options based on the content you’re investigating. Here, you can select Keyframes, which will extract a few distinct still images from the video that you can then perform a reverse image search on. (You could also select other options to search, like by using the video thumbnail.)

• You should now see the images the tool has extracted. Here, you also see a warning that the video has been found in the Database of Known Fakes, or DBKF. This is because a fact-check has been written on it. If you see this, good news – someone’s likely already done the verification work, and you can read their fact-check.

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• Under Results, simply click on any or all images to perform a reverse search on them. This method uses Google Lens to do that, but you can also use other search tools such as TinEye, Yandex or Bing, depending on how you access the tool.
• You can then see where else these and similar images from the video have appeared online. In this case, multiple videos appeared, some of them mentioning a particular interview Eminem did many years ago that we then found on YouTube.

Using this tool meant we could then quickly figure out that the video was a deepfake, where someone had manipulated old interview footage.

These are just the basics, and this verification plugin offers a wide range of other tools for different sleuthing needs. However, some of these are more advanced, and knowledge of online investigation techniques is recommended.

We increasingly access online spaces that claim to offer medical, financial, political and legal guidance. When there are hundreds of opinions on what happened or which medicine works, we need to know who to trust – fast.

While fact-checkers can’t verify everything, tools like this are free and accessible and can equip you with the skills you need to sniff out the snake oil.