Here are tipsheets on the TOOLS used to search online:
internet, web, browsers, search engines, search management tools, etc. 

(Tools) Fact-checking resources

What can researchers do to minimize the use of manipulated content? Here are some fack-checking resources

From our newly launched handbook : Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research (author: Christine Gardiol), available on any AMAZON marketplaces

FACT-CHECKERS are products or services that allow to verify assertions made in speech, print, or online content. Now, essentially online, fact-checking is an old story. It was first set up by The Time magazine in the 1920s and was changed into a job carried out by a special group of staffers who made sure that everything the reporters collected was accurate. If this interests you, The Time has an interesting article on their first fact-checkers[1].

Here is how one of these current online tools works: PolitiFact at https://www.politifact.com/ [2].

It is the COVID-19 pandemic time; you have doubts about some articles and posts concerning the drug Ibuprofen. Open the search form (magnifying glass upper left) and input covid AND ibuprofen. Their search functions are not very sophisticated, unfortunately (alternatively use any general web search engine with the site:. command). PolitiFact returned (early 2025) more than 2205 fact-checks and 785 articles. Click on any of them and you can read a detailed discussion of the claims and sources, with some additional anecdotes; you can also see if more research is needed and other items that can help you judge whether each assertion is credible and reliable. One of their unique features is their « Truth-o-Meter », which rates each checked item, their worst assessment being « Pants on fire ». In their About Us/Our Process, PolitiFact offers an excellent guide for verifying information professionally.

Many fact-checkers work similarly to PolitiFact. They usually allow submitting items to be verified and to review many of the facts they have already checked. These tools most frequently verify political or viral claims, but they may cover topics such as entertainment (which is filled with fake news), technology, health, and so on. They deal with the popular themes of the time, elections, immigration, abortion, marijuana, LGBTQ, crime, war, Coronavirus, and so forth. Some sites provide information on national news only, while others regularly feature international news. Several of them are connected to the press and media. Sometimes they require you to log in, sometimes they charge a small fee, and some perform the service for the users. To make them more concrete, here is a brief presentation of some of them.

  • SNOPES https://www.snopes.com/: the oldest (1994). An independent publication owned by Snopes Media Group. US focus. « The internet’s definitive fact-checking resource… Snopes’ fact-checking and original investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis.”
  • LEADSTORIES  https://leadstories.com/: Focused on “trending content on the internet”. Started in 2015. US focus, but available in various languages. Full-time fact-checking ever since the (US) primaries of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Since 2019, an active part of Facebook’s partnership with third-party fact-checkers. Since 2020, LeadStories has also provided fact-checking-related advice and services to ByteDance, the company running TikTok (in the US, Europe, and Asia). They developed the Trendolizer search engine, which curates news articles, then automatically indexes the source code.  “Nowadays we specifically hunt for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible” (mid July 2024).
  • FULL FACT https://fullfact.org/ : “Full Facts fights bad information”. UK registered charity. Independent. Impartial and Effective. “Bad information ruins lives. We’re a team of independent fact-checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm it does… Our principles are simple. Anyone making serious claims in public debate -fact-checkers included- should be prepared to : Get their facts right; Back up what they say in evidence; Correct their mistakes.”
  • HOAXY2  https://hoaxy.osome.iu.edu/ : “A tool that visualizes the spread of information online using the X/Twitter and Bluesky APIs.” Useful to see how a story develops over time. You can easily import data. Hoaxy is Copyright of the Trustees of Indiana University.

Fact-checker services/software/websites/apps are blooming everywhere.

“Reporters’ Lab” [3] at https://reporterslab.org/fact-checking/, hosted at Duke University maintains a database of fact-checking sites worldwide. In March 2025, they announced 450 active outlets (and about 161 inactive ones) on all continents. If we use the Duke Reporters’ lab figures, the increase between 2015 (64) and 2025 (450) is indicative of a worldwide uneasiness towards information disorders. Reporters’ Lab also maintains Fact-Check Insights, a comprehensive database with structured fact-checking data for tens of thousands of claims from politicians and social media posts that have been analyzed and rated by independent fact-checkers. A very rich resource to whoever wants to study fact-checking and online misinformation. Some other worthwhile resources to consider when debunking manipulated content are the following:

  • Factcheck.org athttps ://www.factcheck.org/[4].It is again a US non-profit organization, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.  It was launched in the US, in 1993, with the goal « to monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases ». It is “one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on the social media network. We provide several resources for readers: a guide on how to flag suspicious stories on Facebook and a list of websites that have carried false or satirical articles, as well as a video and story on how to spot false stories[5]. Early 2025[6], to please the new US president, Zuckerberg announced ending its fact-checking program for its Meta platforms (Facebook, Threads and Instagram), relying instead on the “community notes” from its users, following X.
  • The International Fact-Checking Network : the IFCN is a unit of the Poynter Institute dedicated to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide. Poynter is committed to promoting excellence in fact-checking. Here is a good source for obtaining a fact-checking framework (its code of principles is hosted on the Poynter website, which offers training, ethics, and quite a few resources on media literacy; Politifact mentioned earlier is now owned by Poynter).
  • As journalists’ core ingredient is information, they are obvious resources to consider. See for example, the Verification Handbook, or Disinformation And Media Manipulation published by the European Journalism Centre[7]. Check as well the (US) Society of Professional Journalists Toolbox[8]. Press articles are increasingly mentioning that their assertions have been fact-checked, making the phenomenon more visible educating the public as well. Since 2007, The Washington Post has its Fact-Checker that “truth-squad the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.”
  • University libraries[9], such as the ones of the University of San Francisco or of the Eastern Washington University, can also be excellent resources.

FOR MORE, websearch fact checking or fake news detect or debunk.
Check as well our TIPS on tools & techniques to debunk manipulated VISUAL content.
And for an extensive discussion on INFORMATION MANIPULATION (and much more) check our Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research, available on most AMAZON marketplaces.

[1]              Fabry, M. (2017). Here’s How the First Fact-Checkers Were Able to Do Their Jobs Before the Internet. Time.com. 24 August 2017. Available at: The History of Fact Checking Jobs in News Journalism | TIME [Viewed 20 April 2025]

[2]              Politifact (www.politifact.com) was launched in 2007 by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper. In 2018, its ownership was transferred to the Poynter Institute, a newspaper’s parent company and nonprofit school for journalists. “Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy”. See: https://www.politifact.com/videos/how-politifact-selects-facts-check/ and https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/feb/12/principles-truth-o-meter-politifacts-methodology-i/  [Viewed 25 March 2025]

[3]              Duke Reporters’ Lab. About the Lab. Available at: https://reporterslab.org/about-the-lab/  [Viewed 25 March 2025].

[4]              Factcheck.org  mission (2024): « We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding. ». Available at: https://www.factcheck.org/about/our-mission/ [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[5]              FactCheck.org (2024) at https://www.factcheck.org/spindetectors/about/  and at  https://www.factcheck.org/fake-news/ [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[6]              For further details, websearch facebook fact checking with any recent time option january 2025. Or check the NY Times article on 7 January 2025, available at : Meta Says It Will End Its Fact-Checking Program on Social Media Posts – The New York Times [Viewed 25 March 2025]

[7]              European Journalism Centre (2020). Verification Handbook. For Disinformation And Media Manipulation. datajournlism.com. 2020. Available at : https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/verification-3 .
The European Journalism Centre is available at https://ejc.net/ [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[8]              Society of Professional Journalists Toolbox (2024). Available at: https://www.journaliststoolbox.org/   [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[9]              University of San Francisco, Gleeson Library Geschke Center (2024). Fake News. library.usfca.edu. 24 September 2024. Resources – Fake News – Gleeson Library at University of San Francisco (usfca.edu) and Eastern Washington University Libraries (2024). Research Guides. ewu.edu. 26 September 2024.  Useful Websites for Journalists – Journalism – Research Guides at Eastern Washington University (ewu.edu) [Viewed 20 October 2024]

(Tools) Manipulated VISUAL content: tools & techniques

From: Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research (author: Christine Gardiol), available on AMAZON marketplaces

Audio-visual content manipulation has become the strongest digital concern of this decade, as Gretel Kahn (from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism) emphasized it: “for those who work to debunk disinformation, the rise of AI generated images is indeed a growing concern since a big proportion of the fact-checking they do is image or video-based… disinformation is a particular concern since images are especially compelling and they can have a strong emotive impact on audience’s perceptions” [1].

Researchers are confronted with two forms of visual content manipulations: on the one hand, finely manipulated images, on the other, artificially generated images (also called, synthetic images). AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney are getting very popular and easy to use. According to Kahn, G. (2023) in a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism post, “anyone can create new images through text prompts. Both applications are getting a lot of attention. DALL-E claims more than 3 million users. Midjourney has not published numbers, but they recently halted free trials citing a massive influx of new users”.[2] Professionals in the information field face tough challenges.

Arivazhagan, R. and Chandran, S. in a post from September 2023 “The Quest to Detect and Prevent Image Manipulation”[3], identified four main challenges in detecting image manipulation in research publications. These can be applied to a wide range of data and information:

  1. The sheer volume of published content: With the increasing number of published papers, it is difficult to manually scrutinize every image in every paper.
  2. Limitations of manual detection: Visual scrutiny is currently the standard for analyzing images in scientific papers, but it is time-consuming and prone to errors.
  3. Lack of standardized image manipulation detection tools: There is currently no standardized method or tool for detecting image manipulation in scholarly publications. Many of the available tools are experimental and not user-friendly.
  4. Guidelines specific to the scholarly information industry: There is a lack of guidelines specific to the scholarly information industry for detecting image manipulation.

Tools to DETECT fraudulent dealings in images

Reverse image search engines are excellent tools to identify the origin of some visual content.Rather than inputting a search string, you search uploading an image or copying its URL. These engines allow to investigate images, see where an image appears on the web and if it is from a suspicious source. You can also verify if the image has been modified, stolen, changed, where it originally comes from, etc. Google Image Search (https://images.google.com/) as well as Bing Image (https://www.bing.com/images/ ), and most of the major general-purpose search engines offer this “reverse-image” function; click on the little camera icon in their search box (you must be in their image search engine to see this icon).

In addition, there are some specialized engines, such as https://lenso.ai/en and the CanadianTinEyeat https://tineye.com/, among others.TinEye is a well-known image search and recognition company that constantly crawls the web and adds images to its index. Today the TinEye index is over 71.2 billion images (end of October 2024). For more, websearch reverse image search tools and best.

Besides these reverse image search engines, Google announced (October 2023), working on three ways to check images and sources online[4]. Similar to its “About the source” pop-up window for many of its search results, an “About this image” will allow users to check the credibility and context of online images, the image’s history, other sites that use and describe the image, and the image’s metadata. In addition, Google mentioned expanding its Check Explorer tool to provide fact-checks published by fact-checking entities around the world. Quite some promising features. “AI-generated images are becoming more popular every day.  But how can we better identify them, especially when they look so realistic?”. With this issue in mind, Google DeepMind presented mid-2023, SynthID[5] to “help watermark and identify synthetic images [AI-generated images] created by Imagen”.

InVid at https://www.invid-project.eu/  is a European Union project (2016), which offers an easy-to-use Chrome plugin that allows to verify and debunk videos files and content which is spread via social media. “In video veritas…The InVID innovation action develops a knowledge verification platform to detect emerging stories and assess the reliability of newsworthy video files and content spread via social media”.

https://fotoforensics.com  is a forensic tool that allows users to see if a picture has been manipulated. The picture must be original and of high quality.  « FotoForensics provides budding researchers and professional investigators access to cutting-edge tools for digital photo forensics”[6]. Along this line, are imageforensic.org and fakeimagedetector.com.

More and more tools are coming onto the market for tracking visual content manipulation. Some entities also propose their “image manipulation detection services”. Such as enago.com, “Author First, Quality First”. According to MarketsandMarkets[7], the global market of fake image detection tools is expected to grow at a CAGR of 41,6%. Development is thus in full swing in this field. For more, websearch tools detect image manipulation or edited or fake.

Tools to PREVENT fraudulent dealings in images

Besides the many tools to detect fraudulent dealings in images, a few are being developed to prevent images being manipulated by artificial intelligence. Researchers from the MIT CSAIL[8] proposed (early 2023) an AI tool, PhotoGuard, to protect images against AI manipulation[9]. According to a post from David Curry[10], PhotoGuard is a “protective shield which alters photos at a level unnoticeable to the human eye. With this alteration, images which are then run through a generative system will look unrealistic or warped, which should prevent them from being used for indecent purposes.” This is a promising development.

 In a May 2024 blog post, Gelato[11] (the world’s largest print-on-demand network) proposed four strategies to protect its clients’ artworks from AI, namely:

  1. watermarking and digital signatures (watermarking are subtle, semi-transparent logos embedded in one’s artwork);
  2. opting out (some AI platforms now allow to register an artwork, explicitly requesting it not to be included in the datasets used to train their AI models);
  3. cloaking images with Glaze or Nightshade (these introduce subtle modifications, not seen by the human eye, which confuse AI algorithms);
  4. taking legal action.

The number of tools that prevent visual content from being manipulated is still limited. It is expected that more and more of these tools to detect whether a photo has been generated or edited by AI will come onto the market. The stakes are large, especially when it comes to people’s image. Identity theft has grown into a serious issue[12], especially, when the person is a politician, a religious leader, any influential person. Tools at both ends of the spectrum are being launched: upstream, to help protect images from being manipulated, downstream, to help users detect manipulated or artificially created images.

Tools are not enough …

Besides the tools, a systematic information evaluation is essential to any research process. High-quality reliable information is what makes a difference. In a Reuters Institute of Journalism’s post, De Marvel, V., a university professor offers some basic and sensible tips on assessing visual content[13]: “to look at the context around the image and question who is distributing these ‘news’: the more politically incendiary an image is, the more hesitant we should be about its veracity”. A tip from a HuffPost online workshop in June 2020, “Think before you link: How readers can help fight misinformation online“[14], goes in a similar direction: any information that makes you jump, think about it, and check further before forwarding. It is a modest start to applying critical thinking to online content, which anyone can easily relate to.

Our first handbook presented various information evaluation and assessment techniques. Being able to identify any information disorders and assess the reliability of a piece of information has become a vital skill for anyone relying on the internet for its research projects, whether academically, professionally or privately. Besides demonstrating its relevance, we provide various techniques and recommendations. One is the “4R” which allows to drill down into any information in an organized way. Here’s a quick reminder. 

Recency : My results are timely and current.
Relevancy : They answer my research questions or I can justify why they don’t.
Reliability : They are trustworthy and reliable. I trust their authors, their intentions and their author-ity. 
Richness : I provide a variety of contextualized perspectives and points of view.

From: Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research,  and Master BASIC Digital Tools for Research, available on most AMAZON marketplaces

[1]              Kahn, G. (2023). Will AI-generated images create a new crisis for fact-checkers? Expert are not so sure. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk. (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford). 11 April 2023. Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/will-ai-generated-images-create-new-crisis-fact-checkers-experts-are-not-so-sure  [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[2]              Kahn, G. (2023). Will AI-generated images create a new crisis for fact-checkers? Expert are not so sure. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk. (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford). 11 April 2023. Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/will-ai-generated-images-create-new-crisis-fact-checkers-experts-are-not-so-sure  [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[3]              Arivazhagan, R. & Chandran, S. (2023). The Quest to Detect and Prevent Image Manipulation. straive.com. 21 September 2023. Available at: https://www.straive.com/blogs/the-quest-to-detect-and-prevent-image-manipulation/  See as well strive.com white paper: protecting-the-integrity-of-scientific-images – Straive Website [Viewed 17 July 2024]

[4]              Hebbar, N. and Savcak, C. (2023). 3 new ways to check images and sources online. Google blog – search. 25 October 2023. Available at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-new-fact-checking-features/ [Viewed 18 July 2024]

[5]              Gowal, S. and Kohli, P. (2023). Identifying AI-generated images with SynthID. Google DeepMind. 29 August 2023. Available at: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/identifying-ai-generated-images-with-synthid/ [Viewed 18 July 2024] 

[6]              FotoForensics. Tutorial: Using FotoForensics. https://fotoforensics.com/tutorial-about.php [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[7]              MarketsandMarkets (2024). Fake Image Detection Market (Solutions and Services)..marketsandmarkets.com. April 2024. Available at: Fake Image Detection Market Size, Share and Global Forecast to 2029 | MarketsandMarkets [Viewed 21 July 2024]

[8]              Salman, H. & all (2023). Raising the Cost of Malicious AI-Powered Image Editing. arxiv.org. 13 February 2023. Available at: 2302.06588 (arxiv.org) .  See as well, Using AI to protect against AI image manipulation | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

[9] .           PhotoGuard code is available at : https://github.com/MadryLab/photoguard

[10]            Curry, David (2023). Researchers Create Tool To Prevent AI Image Manipulation. From rtinsights.com. 28 August 2023. Available at : Researchers Create Tool To Prevent AI Image Manipulation (rtinsights.com) [Viewed 17 July 2024]

[11]            How To Protect Your Art From AI In 2024 (gelato.com) [Viewed 17 July 2024]

[12]            If the subject is of interest, websearch identity theft and statistics. And check from scantionscanner, Identity Theft Statistics. 17 September 2024. Available at: https://www.sanctionscanner.com/blog/identity-theft-statistics-587 [Viewed 24 October 2024]

[13]            Kahn, G. (2023). Will AI-generated images create a new crisis for fact-checkers? Experts are not so sure. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk. (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford). 11 April 2023. Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/will-ai-generated-images-create-new-crisis-fact-checkers-experts-are-not-so-sure  [Viewed 20 July 2024]

[14]            Huffpost Editors (2020). Think Before You Link : How You Can Help Fight Misinformation Online. huffpost.com. 8 June 2020. Available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-fight-misinformation-online_n_5ed140f5c5b68d76d74cf196. [Viewed 17 October 2020].