9 Using Google Reverse Image Search
Most of the time finding the origin of an image on Twitter is easy. Just follow the links. For instance, take the chart in this tweet from Twitter user @NinjaEconomics. Should you evaluate it it by figuring out who @NinjaEconomics is?
Nope. Just follow that link to the source. Links are usually the last part of a tweet.
If you do follow that link, the chart is there, with a bunch more information about the data behind it and how it was produced. It’s from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, and it’s the Fed–not @NinjaEconomics–that you want to evaluate.
But sometimes people will post a photo that has no source, as this person does here:
So we have questions.
First, is this actually a National Geographic photographer? More importantly, is this real? Is that lava so hot that it will literally set a metal tripod on fire? That seems weird, but we’re not lava experts.
There’s no link here, so we’re going to use reverse image search. If you’re using Google Chrome as a browser, put the cursor over the photo and right-click (control-click on a Mac). A “context menu” will pop up and one of the options will be “Search Google for image.”
(For the sake of narrative simplicity we will show solutions in this text as they would be implemented in Chrome. Classes using this text are advised to use Chrome where possible. The appendix contains notes about translating these tactics to other browsers, and you can of course search the web for the Firefox and Safari corollaries.)
When we reverse search this image we find a bunch of pages that contain the photo, from a variety of sites. One of the sites returned is Reddit. Reddit is a site that is famous for sharing these sorts of photos, but it also has a reputation for having a user base that is very good at spotting fake photos.
When we go to the Reddit page we find there is an argument there over whether the photo is fake or not. But again, Reddit is not our source here–we need to go further upstream. So we click the link in the Reddit forum that says it’s real and get taken to an article where they actually talk to the photographer:
That brings us to one of the original stories about this photo:
Now we could stop here and just read the headline. But all good fact-checkers know that headlines lie. So we read the article down to the bottom:
For this particular shot, Singson says, “Always trying to be creative, I thought it would be pretty cool (hot!) to take a lava pic with my shoes and tripod on fire while photographing lava.”
This may be a bit pedantic, but I still don’t know if this was staged. Contrary to the headline the photographer doesn’t say lava made his shoes catch on fire. He says he wanted to take a picture of himself with his shoes on fire while standing on lava.
So did his shoes catch on fire, or did he set them on fire? I do notice at the bottom of this page though that this is just a retelling of an article published elsewhere; it’s not this publication who talked to the