The viral ‘abandoned child’ story: Feel-good posts can be fake too! – Truth or Fake
It’s a heartwarming story: a Danish humanitarian worker, Anja Ringgren Loven, helped this starving child in 2016. The moment when she offered him water was captured on camera, and the picture went viral online.
Debunked: Putin’s ‘Bond villain’ house doesn’t exist
Two pictures of a white, futuristic building in a forest went briefly viral in early April with the false claim that the building belonged to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
How to fact-check images online
For this section, we will look at claims that come in form of images. The images could be distorted to misrepresent an issue. It could as well be an old image shared to depict a new reality but from a different context.
Whichever form an image is presented on the internet you might be able to verify it with the aid of tools for image fact-checking such as are Google Reverse Image Search, Tin Eye, InVid, Yandex and so on.
Fake: Flag with Nazi Swastika in Ukraine
On September 20, the official Twitter account of the Permanent Mission of Russia in Geneva published a photo entitled “Modern Ukraine. Human Rights on the Upgrade”, showing a building with Ukrainian and Nazi flags.
However, this photo has been “wandering” around the Network under different titles for a long time. Let us recall that it was taken during the shooting of a movie in Kharkiv in 2011.