I’ve got my RevEye on you
I want to introduce you to a tool that can easily be used to debunk falsehoods on the internet. I use it frequently.
The tool is called RevEye, and there are versions for either Chrome or Firefox. RevEye is an extension for your web browser, that makes it easy to perform a search for an image.
Here’s an example of how it can be useful.
I found this meme on Twitter.
Now, if you know anything about the plastic straw initiative in California, homelessness, or humor, you know this is a bad meme without doing any fact-checking. But as a reporter, I want to find the proper context for this image, because it obviously has nothing to do with plastic straws. So where is it from?
An image search is probably the easiest way to find out. With RevEye installed on my browser, all I need to do is right-click on it, and select “Reverse image search.”
Selecting “All search engines” pulls up a tab for each of the options below. You can choose your favorite, but I usually check all of them. Each one is a search engine capable of accepting an image as a search parameter. Now that I have four new tabs, I can go to each of them and see what comes up.
Google Images mostly turns up the same meme and places it has been posted, like the Facebook group “You Can’t Dump the Trump”.
Bing turned up a lot of similar images from across the internet, mostly homeless camps and slums.
TinEye showed a lot of places on Twitter and Imgur where the exact same image was shared. It’s one way of seeing who might be sharing the image in question, and how they’ve each been labeling it. One place I found it was a deleted account. People responding were addressing former President Donald Trump.
In this case, Yandex brought me the best information, though. The second result on the page was a link to this article.
Not only is there the name of the person claiming to be the original image’s photographer, but there’s a full article below the gallery of images. It’s from a student-run newspaper in California.
Residents of tents and other temporary shelters found themselves on the streets once again, after the City of Oakland evicted the homeless encampment formerly located at the corner of East 12th Street and 23rd Avenue over the course of two weeks starting Jan. 31.
The City planned to relocate the estimated 39 residents from this encampment to the Community Cabins, or “Tuff Sheds,” located at 1449 Miller Ave., said Joe DeVries, Oakland’s assistant to the city administrator and chief privacy officer.
However, Needa Bee, an organizer in Oakland’s homeless advocacy group, The Village, said that the number of people at the location was actually at least 56 and as high as 70 at times and, consequently, there were not enough shelters for everyone displaced.
Someone decided this was a good time for a crack about plastic straws, but I find it decidedly unfunny.
If you aren’t using Chrome or Firefox, or you don’t want to install an extension, you can always just bookmark Google Images, Bing, Yandex and TinEye, and upload the images or image URL individually. I prefer the shortcut of RevEye.
Other things this technique is useful for:
Uncovering false profiles by discovering the true source of the profile photo
Exposing “fake news” by revealing the story the original photo is from
Unveiling edited photos as fakes by finding the original
Finding out who shared an image to social media
Verifying the original date or owner of a photograph
Finding similar photos for use in media projects
This is one of the primary tools for uncovering lies on social media, and it’s relatively easy to use, too. But practice makes perfect!