Attacks, natural disasters, pandemics… On social networks, every tragic event is an opportunity to rewrite history, in the name of a truth supposedly hidden by the elites. And these claims are often accompanied by “evidence” such as photos or videos.
Lately, the dramatic fires in Hawaii have once again been the occasion for thousands of publications to flourish assuring that “lasers” had been used to start the fires. Once again, photos and videos were used as “evidence”.
Except that everything can be easily removed with Google Lens in particular.
It is one of the most powerful tools for detecting fake news. With the Google Lens tool, you can search for the original source of a photo. In Google Chrome, simply right-click on the image in question and select “Search for image with Google Lens”. A frame appears on the right, at the top of which you can select “view image source”.
For example, this image purporting to represent a “laser” hitting Hawaii:
Using Google Lens, we realize that it has been used by various sites since 2018 to illustrate the takeoff of a SpaceX rocket and we realize, above all, that it comes from the company’s image gallery.
If you don’t use Chrome, you can also access this service by clicking on the little camera in the Google search engine bar. You can drag a photo or directly copy a link.
Note that Google is not the only one that does this, most search engines (Bing, Yandex…) also allow it.
It’s also possible to find the source of a video, again using Google Lens (or the competing equivalent). Take a screenshot of the image and pass it back to Google Lens. You will be able to find the font if it has been used in the past.
Source: BFM TV
