Google Earth’s terrain view is also valuable when examining terrain and the relative dimensions of buildings. Recently when the team at Storyful was considering a video as evidence supporting a reported Israeli strike on Syria, Google Earth Terrain’s view of mountains north of Damascus verified the location of a YouTube uploader, as you can see in the below comparison. Verify the date Confirming the date of videos uploaded from a planned event like a demonstration or political rally is generally straightforward. Other videos of the same event are likely to exist via news reports, and corroborating pictures are usually shared on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites. Searching these platforms with relevant keywords and hashtags is usually sufficient to discover supporting evidence such as distinctive buildings or street furniture, placards or weather conditions. However, for more obscure videos, date is generally the most difficult piece of metadata to verify. YouTube videos are time-stamped in Pacific Standard Time (PST) from the moment the upload begins. This led Russia’s Foreign Ministry to cast doubt5 on videos depicting a chemical weapons attack on Ghouta near Damascus: The videos were uploaded in the early hours of August 21, and therefore were dated on YouTube as August 20. The Foreign Ministry’s ignorance of this prompted it and others to claim the videos were staged and uploaded ahead of the reported time of the attack. Weather reports alone are insufficient to verify dates, but they help. As previously detailed, Wolfram Alpha provides weather information about a place on a particular date. After Rita Krill uploaded what purported to be amazing video6 of a lightning strike in her Florida backyard on October 5, 2012, Wolfram Alpha showed that thunderstorms were active in the area. 52