At the behest of a client, Storyful set about verifying the video two years after it happened. The video shows a large group of women chanting “ADO” (a reference to Alassane Dramane Ouattara, Gbagbo’s rival). Then, at the 3:32 mark, armored personnel carriers come into view and large-caliber rounds are fired. Several people appear to be fatally wounded. At the time, some Ivorians claimed the injuries were staged. The country’s then defense minister cast doubt5 over the video and Gbagbo supporters claimed the video was a “fake” in YouTube reconstructions (here6 and here7). Verifying video in a breaking news scenario is in some respects easier than this form of retrospective investigation. Information that corroborates or debunks a video is more accessible in the recent timeframe; information related to an older event is often hidden deep within social networks. Archival search is either challenging or not possible. With those limitations in mind, here’s how I worked to try to verify the video. Gather context on the event Unfamiliar with the details of the reported massacre, I searched Google for “Women killed Gbagbo March 3 2011.” This returned several reports (here8 and here9) describing the approximate location and the sequence of events. This search also returned10 a statement about the event made by the country’s then defense minister, who claimed the scenes were staged. Importantly, these reports also provided keywords I could use to run a more focused search. Using these terms for historical search on Twitter and YouTube, I unearthed eyewitness accounts and UGC. (Always try to put yourself in the shoes of the uploader and imagine how she would tag and describe video and other information.) 60