How to fact-check viral videos during a breaking UK news story

The clip lands in the newsroom group chat at 9.47am. It is nine seconds long, filmed vertically, and shows what looks like a police cordon outside a shopping centre. The caption says it was shot ten minutes ago in the city where your reporter is already driving. Someone asks the obvious question: can we use it?

Most footage sent during a breaking story is genuine. The problem is rarely that it was faked. It is that the clip is real but the context is wrong — filmed in a different town, on a different date, or cropped so tightly that the crowd outside a protest looks like a riot. Verification is not a hunt for deepfakes. It is the slower, more useful work of confirming that what a post claims is actually true.

Start by writing the claim down

Before you open a single tool, put the claim into one plain sentence: this footage shows a fire at a warehouse in Salford on the morning of 14 March. Everything you check should either support that sentence or chip away at it.

Ask what would have to be true for it to hold. There would be a fire, in Salford, that morning, at a building that looks like a warehouse. Each of those is testable. Vague clips are hard to verify; specific claims are not.

Reverse image search, done properly

Screenshot the clip at three points — opening seconds, middle and end — and search each frame separately. Searching the whole video rarely works well; searching a tight crop around a street sign, a shopfront or a distinctive building works far better.

• Google Lens and Bing Visual Search are the quick first pass and often turn up news articles from elsewhere in the world.
• Yandex frequently surfaces matches the others miss, particularly faces and images shared on Russian-language platforms.
• TinEye is useful for chronology: it will show you the earliest appearance it can find, which is often the moment a clip entered circulation.

What you are looking for is an earlier upload. If the same footage appeared three weeks ago credited to a different city, you have your answer in under two minutes. Look too for the same clip with a different caption, or a longer version that includes material trimmed from the viral edit — the missing seconds are often where the truth sits. Search text as well: distinctive audio, a placard slogan, or a phrase someone repeats in the background.

Geolocation: matching the frame to the map

Open Google Earth or OpenStreetMap alongside the video and look for features that cannot change overnight: a church spire, a bridge parapet, the angle of a terrace roofline, a mast, road markings, hills on the horizon. Shop signs, bus stop designs, number plates and which side of the road cars are driving on will tell you the country, sometimes the county.

Then test the time. Shadow direction and length can be checked with a sun position calculator for that date and latitude; if the shadows do not fit, the timestamp is wrong. Weather records for the day will confirm whether the rain in the clip was plausible. Season is a useful check too — full-leaf trees in a February clip, or snow in a summer flood story, should make you stop. Beware of anything generic: anonymous industrial estates, motorway slip roads and new-build housing can be anywhere.

Metadata, and why it usually disappears

Original files carry EXIF data: camera model, often a timestamp and sometimes GPS coordinates. Almost none of that survives a trip through WhatsApp, Instagram or X, which compress files and strip the useful fields. So work with the source directly. If someone claims to have filmed the incident, ask them to send the untouched file by email or a file-transfer service rather than a messaging app, and check it before they delete it from their phone.

Archive the post at the moment you find it. The Wayback Machine and archive.today will preserve a page that may be deleted within the hour, and a screenshot with the URL and visible timestamp is a decent fallback. Deleted accounts are common after a backlash, and you will want the record.

Unverified is a label, not a verdict. Write it into the copy and the story still stands.

A workflow that survives deadline pressure

1. Write the claim in one sentence and keep it in front of you.
2. Save everything: original post URL, account handle, time you saw it, downloaded file, screenshots.
3. Reverse search three frames from the clip.
4. Geolocate using two independent landmarks, not one.
5. Check the date against shadows, weather and seasonal detail.
6. Find the earliest upload, and message that person politely. Say who you are, why you are asking and what you need to know.
7. Ask a colleague to try to disprove your conclusion. Fresh eyes catch what momentum hides.

Judge the account as well as the footage

A clip is stronger when it comes with a history. Check when the account was created, what it normally posts about, whether it seems to be local, and whether it replies to people. Aggregator accounts that repost anything dramatic are a weak source even when the footage is real.

The best confirmation is multiple, independent angles. Three unrelated accounts in the same area, posting different views at roughly the same time, is far more persuasive than one clip seen a million times. Watch for clusters of brand-new accounts pushing identical frames with identical wording; that pattern means coordination, not corroboration. High engagement tells you nothing about accuracy.

If you cannot confirm it, say so clearly

Some clips will still be unverifiable when the deadline hits. That does not always mean dropping them. It means being precise in the copy: footage circulating on social media appears to show, rather than a headline that states the event as fact. Tell readers what you have and have not established, and what you are doing to check.

Think about harm before you publish. Footage may show victims, injured people or a house that identifies someone at risk. It may be graphic, may involve children, or may relate to live proceedings; if you are unsure where the line sits, get legal advice before it goes out. And if new information shows the clip was wrong, correct it quickly and openly — a short, clear correction costs far less than a slow one.

Photo: jano gepiga / Pexels