Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Hari Sreenivasan. Welcome to another episode of Take on Fake, where we'll try to debunk some of the things you may have seen or even shared online. Did you see the video of the allegedly escaped coronavirus patient in Italy? It was dramatic. A man being chased by men in hazmat suits while he screamed help to stunned passers-by. So why did this go viral? And how can you, as a viewer, determine if it's real or if it's not? For that, we turn to Laura Garcia. She works with First Draft, and she works with journalists all over the world to help them verify what they find online.

Speaker 2: So one of the most common types of disinformation that we see online are images and videos that are not manipulated. They haven't been doctored or edited in any way. They're just old, or they're taken out of context. And I know this from the work that we do at First Draft. So my initial thought was, can we look for this video and see if it's existed on the internet

Speaker 1: before? If you can walk me through this, let me see what you're looking at and what you did.

Speaker 2: This is the original tweet that we're talking about. And a couple of things to look at it. So the writing in Arabic says exactly the same thing as the tweet, an Italian coroner patient escaped from hospital. So I've got a friend who speaks Arabic, and I asked him to translate real quick. And the other thing is that the person who shared it, if we look at this person's account, they have quite a lot of followers. So I was actually concerned that because this person shared it and has a big following, a bunch of people were going to share it. And I went to a plugin called InBit. So this is an amazing kind of like all solution plugin. And it has a bunch of tools for journalists to use anything from looking at YouTube thumbnails or searching through Twitter. And the one that I wanted was this one that says analysis, because you can then take a link from a video on Twitter or on YouTube. And it does a little bit of detective share looking on it. So here, for example, it gives me more information about the account, local time it was posted, a bunch of more information that I can use to kind of decide whether the account is legit. And then at the bottom, here is the magic trick. It takes a thumbnail that I can then reverse image search. And this reverse image search is where you can kind of ask the internet, whether it's Google or another search engine, has something been uploaded to the internet before with a thumbnail like this? Can you find this online? So I searched across all of them and started to find it in other places. So it's been on Twitter before, found it on TikTok, found it on 9gag, a website that people used to share memes and funny stuff. So again, I was already thinking, maybe this isn't true. And the most important thing is that I found versions of this video

Speaker 1: dating back to even 2015. Okay, so that we did not have coronavirus in 2015. That's the big clue,

Speaker 2: right? We did not have coronavirus. So for certain, I knew this had nothing to do with coronavirus was not from 2020. And maybe we could have stopped there. But I started to dig deeper, because you can write. So I eventually found this version that looks like it was shared on Snapchat, because it has this strap across the middle of it. Yeah. The important thing about this version is that it's the best resolution I could find. And it means that if I blow it up, I can actually read some of the street signs and look for more clues. Can we at least find out where it's from, and then verify the original source that way. So I started to look, for example, this banner here at the back, I don't know if you can see, but it says 25C, kind of like American's Right Sense. I lived in the States for a while, thought maybe that's a clue. You can see them past a car park in a corner, then past a really colorful building, which I thought, well, that might be easy to find. You can see the type of cars on the road.

Speaker 1: They're bigger than American cars. They're driving on the right side of the road.

Speaker 2: Exactly. So you can start to like eliminate by the process. Definitely not the UK or somewhere where they drive on the other side. Definitely not Italy, because Italian cars are really small. These streets are so wide for Italy. That is not it. You can see the name of a business. So that to me reads DM something, something, you and I, like unisex, like a hairdressers or a hair salon. But the kicker was this. You can see this particular post on that side that reads KEAN, K-E-A-N. So what did I do? What we all do when we have a question. I went to the internet. So you can see it's in Union, New Jersey, and that's the logo that we're looking at. So if you then type Union, New Jersey into Google Maps. It's actually not a big town, like a lot of college towns in the US. So you have a couple of choices of where to go from there. What I chose to do was to Google the business. Businesses tend to be listed on the internet because they want people to find them. So I went back to the internet and typed in D apostrophe M because I could make that out. Unisex, Union, New Jersey. Eventually, if you scroll to the results, you can find a Facebook account for a business that is listed on this street, Damaro's Unisex Hair Salon. And you can see if we walk through Street View, hair salon is right there. And what not, colorful building on the corner. So we know exactly where the video is from. We know it's not from 2020. We know it's not in Italy and it has nothing to do with coronavirus. That's huge. So what was the video about? Because it's been filmed in a college town in the US and it's been shared on places like 9GAG or other meme websites. I'm kind of assuming some college kids in the US thought it would be really funny and it was a prank that got taken out of context. But sometimes with this stuff, you kind of just have to assume as long as you know what something isn't, that gives you the answers that you were looking for.

Speaker 1: In this age of misinformation, it is crucial to have the Laura Garcia's out there who can corroborate the evidence and debunk the myths and just plain old check the facts and show their work. But we see so many different types of information that comes across our social feeds all day long. How do you know that all of that has been put to the same level of scrutiny? What's the solution? Well, become your own fact checker. If something seems a bit off, too good to be true, almost looks like a Hollywood movie, check the facts and maybe use some of the tools that Laura showed us today. Until next time, I'm Hari Sreenivasan. Don't spread fake news, keep it real. Hey there, thanks for watching this episode of Take on Fake. If you want to see the tools that Laura shared today, they are in the description below. Let us know what you think in the comments and don't forget to subscribe so you know when the next episode of Take on Fake drops.