showed Typhoon Usagi as it headed toward Hong Kong; in fact it was an old image of another event. People downloading content from YouTube and uploading it to their own accounts, claiming it as their own, cause other problems. This isn’t a hoax - it’s what is known as a “scrape” - but it means we have to work harder to find the original uploader of the content. The difficulty of finding original footage was demonstrated when the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released a playlist of 13 videos8 that had originally appeared on YouTube, which they had used to look for evidence related to the 2013 chemical weapons attack on East Gouta in Syria. A number of these videos were taken from a well-known Syrian aggregator YouTube channel which regularly republishes videos from other people’s channels. This suggested the videos within the playlist were not the original videos and were in fact “scrapes.” Using a range of different verification techniques, Félim McMahon from Storyful was able to discover the original versions of these videos. He wrote up the process here9. What this example shows is that these issues are no longer just a concern for the journalism community. Verification checks Verification is a key skill, made possible through free online tools and old-fashioned journalism techniques. No technology can automatically verify a piece of UGC with 100 percent certainty. However, the human eye or traditional investigations aren’t enough either. It’s the combination of the two. When a journalist or humanitarian professional finds a piece of information or content via social media, or has it sent to her, there are four elements to check and confirm: 1. Provenance: Is this the original piece of content? 2. Source: Who uploaded the content? 3. Date: When was the content created? 4. Location: Where was the content created? 1. Provenance: Confirming the authenticity of the piece of content If you find content on a social media profile, you have to run a number of checks on that profile to make sure it is real. In the case of a tweet, be aware that the site lemmetweetthatforyou.com10 makes it shockingly easy to fake a tweet, which can be then shared as a picture. 27