Fact-checking is a fundamental part of any form of journalism, and mobile reporting is no exception. You don’t have to be a professional fact-checker to verify if the information you provide is accurate – just follow these simple steps:
- Check what reliable news sources are saying about a story. Publications that have their own professional fact-checking teams have likely already double-checked many of the questions you might have about a given issue.
- Do a Google search. You might be surprised how many fact-checks or explainers you can find about a story or issue with a simple online search.
- Look at what other journalists have already published on the subject, especially from reliable news sources.
- Try to find at least two sources for every piece of information you might be using. Look for any inconsistencies, contradictions, or conflicting facts between sources.
- Look at the location of a video taken, and cross-reference it with other images or videos of the area to see if the video was really filmed in the stated location.
- With photos, use Google’s reverse image search and reupload the photo into the search engine. From there, you can find what other sites are using the photo, and often the original source of the image.
IJNet's parent organization, ICFJ, partnered with the Meta Journalism Project and Seen on its Facebook Video Storytellers-Africa program.