Everyone has experienced the menace of fake news and torrent of forwards which many people mindlessly circulate. At best it is a huge waste of time and at worst it leads to violence and wrong people winning elections!
It is very important to apply filters based on prior reputation of sources of news but then there are fakes which appear to be genuine which must be subjected to a scrutiny using some programs. Here are a few tips.
How to check using Google?
Just type a part of the sentence in the search box and add at the end – fact check or – fake? And you will get the response of multiple fact checking sites. You can view them and decide about the authenticity determined for the matching sentence/text.
Alternatively, you can visit specific fact checking sites and type the text you want to search. But nothing is more powerful than Google.
Well-known fact checkers:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.boomlive.in/amp
https://factsmodified.factchecker.in/
There are many programs that can perform reverse image search. You need to upload the image you wish to search. The one I use on phone most frequently is:
https://www.labnol.org/reverse/
On the phone, use the camera icon on the right side inside the google search box – this helps to find matching images. Though this is less powerful than the above program (labnol).
On a computer, the reverse image search can be done using Google. For some reason Google removed the feature in Chrome version that runs on Windows. Now Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) offers the same capability – inside the search box, use the Camera icon to do a reverse image search. Bing is powered by ChatGPT – so you can do many more things – ask questions and receive human like responses. However, often, it will give wrong answers – so donot rely on it always – if it shows URLs, you may visit those and verify the authenticity of claims yourself.
Practice smart (advanced) searching on Google:
To get to the advanced search page, use this url in your browser (save it for frequent use):
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Here is another example:
In a WhatsApp post, clip of “world alliance of doctors” there were interviews with “experts” claiming that Corona virus is an ordinary flu and that pandemic is a hoax, a conspiracy to make money!
So, first step, crop a photo:
Second step upload it using the program (type this name in your browser):
It will report many websites talking about this photo/video:
You can visit these websites and decide which is authentic.. I know from prior knowledge that www.boomlive.in is reputed. So I would like to rely on what it reports!
So, I would load the link of the above website in the Google search results shown above and save that link to share with others:
Now I could post the above link on WhatsApp for others to read about the fact-checked through www.boomlive.in
How to search for original video? Here is a blog with tips and references:
https://blog.accusonus.com/video-editing/reverse-video-search/
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What does it mean to be truly educated?
Noam Chomsky .. most important – its your ability to discover independently without external influence – spirit of enquiry – to seek and determine truth..
Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.