Before you believe it, or forward it
“Someone sent me a video and I cannot tell if it is real.”
Work out what you are actually looking at
What that costs right now
- A convincing fake now costs almost nothing to make, and the people targeted first are usually the ones least equipped to check.
- The instinct to forward something alarming is faster than the instinct to verify it.
- A crowd of accounts all saying the same thing feels like consensus, and is often one person.
What this does about it
- Walks you through a check in plain language — breathe, check, decide.
- Explains the signs to look for, so you can do it again next time without the tool.
- For investigators: looks at whether a crowd is coordinated rather than whether one post is fake.
What it deliberately does not do
It will not tell you that something is definitely fake. It reports indicators and how they converge, and stops short of a verdict — because a confident wrong answer about a real person does more damage than an honest uncertain one.
For a team, not one person
Investigators, newsroom verification desks, trust-and-safety teams
- The forensic workspace: signals, co-engagement graph, exhibits
- A signed, reproducible evidence packet another analyst can re-run
- Tamper-evident capture, so the record holds up later
- Instead of an analyst assembling the same evidence by hand and hoping it survives review.