A screenshot lands in the family group chat: a headline, a grainy photo, and a line urging everyone to "share before it's deleted". Your thumb hovers over the forward button. Five minutes is enough to work out whether it deserves to travel any further — and it is almost always less time than the argument that follows if you get it wrong.
Treat the Screenshot as a Rumour, Not a Source
Screenshots strip out everything that helps you judge a claim: the date, the account, the replies, the correction posted underneath. Anyone can crop a real headline, change a single word in an image, or paste a quote next to a logo it never came from.
So the first move is to find the original. Copy a distinctive phrase — eight or ten words — put it in quotation marks, and search for it. Try the platform's own search bar with the same phrase. If a story is genuine and being widely reported, you should find it in more than one place, and the earliest version will normally come from a publisher with a name, a corrections policy and a phone number.
Draw a blank beyond the screenshot itself? That isn't proof of a lie, but it is a good reason to slow down.
The Five-Minute Drill
Run these steps in order. Stop as soon as you have a clear answer.
- Find the original post. Not the reshare, not the screenshot. Identify the account that posted it first, then look at what else that account publishes.
- Read the date. Not the date it reached you — the date it was first published. Recycled material is the most common trick there is.
- Reverse-search the image. Crop tightly around the main subject, then search. A full screenshot with text and borders confuses the tool.
- Check the outlet. Is there an "About" page, a named editor, a registered company behind it? Does the site publish anything other than outrage?
- Look for the boring version. A local newspaper, a council statement, a police force press release, an NHS trust update, a company filing. Boring sources are hard to fake and rarely worth a hoaxer's effort.
- Ask what's missing. No names, no location, no date, nobody asked to comment. Real reporting usually contains at least one inconvenient detail.
Dates, Places and Recycled Footage
Footage of floodwater surging down a street can come from anywhere and any year, and it will resurface the next time heavy rain hits the UK. The same goes for crowd footage, storm damage and dramatic police clips. Before you accept the caption, check whether the weather, the clothing and the surroundings match the claim.
If a location is named, look at it. Street View will show you the shopfronts, road layout and signage. Compare the road markings, the direction of traffic, and the colour of the number plates — UK vehicles carry yellow plates at the rear and white at the front. A clip with everything on the wrong side of the road is not a British street.
Images embedded in a page can also carry information: some sites keep the original file name, which often hints at a different subject or a different year entirely.
Images and Video: Two Quick Checks
Images
Use more than one reverse image search. Google's image search and TinEye are the usual starting points, and Yandex is sometimes better on faces and places. If the same photograph appears years earlier in a completely different context, you have your answer. If it appears only in the last few hours, on accounts that copied each other, you have a different answer.
Video
Watch it twice: once at normal speed, once slowly. Check shadows, weather, clothing and language. Look for watermarks, channel logos and screen-recorded interfaces, which usually mean the clip has been lifted from somewhere else. Search a distinctive line of speech. And be sceptical of anything labelled "live" that has clearly been edited — genuine live footage rarely has jump cuts.
Who Benefits From You Believing This?
Ask what the account gets out of it. Some farm engagement, some sell supplements or subscriptions, some push a political line. The warning signs are consistent:
- The account is new, or posts dozens of times a day on unrelated subjects.
- The bio contains a fundraising link, a shop or a paid newsletter.
- The post leans on urgency: "share before it's deleted", "they don't want you to know".
- Replies are switched off, or full of people asking for a source and getting no answer.
- The quoted "expert" has no institution, no registration and no traceable history before last week.
Organisations can be checked properly and quickly. Companies appear at Companies House. Charities appear on the register for England and Wales, or with OSCR in Scotland and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. Anyone offering financial services should be on the Financial Conduct Authority register. Doctors, nurses, solicitors and accountants all sit under professional regulators. If a name does not appear where it should, treat that as a serious warning rather than a technicality.
Recognised fact-checking desks — Full Fact, BBC Verify, Reuters Fact Check and the verification teams at larger newsrooms — can save you the work entirely. Read their reasoning rather than just their verdict, and remember that no fact-checker has covered everything. Silence is not a clean bill of health.
Health, Money and the Law
Claims in these areas travel fastest because they are frightening or tempting. A supplement that supposedly treats a condition, a tax change that will "cost you thousands", a new driving offence, a benefits rule that doesn't exist. Do not act on any of it without checking a source that is accountable for being right. For health, start with the NHS website and your GP. For tax, benefits and pensions, use GOV.UK and, where advice is needed, a regulated adviser on the FCA register. For legal questions, speak to a solicitor. None of this is a substitute for professional advice, and a viral post certainly isn't.
The Last Sixty Seconds
If you cannot verify it, do not share it — not even with "not sure if this is true" attached, because that line travels far more slowly than the claim. Say what you found instead. "I couldn't find this anywhere else." "That photo is from years ago." If a post is a clear fake and it is on a major platform, use the report button. If a friend sends you something shaky, reply with the original link rather than a lecture; most people forward things because they care, not because they are careless.
Verification isn't about being the sharpest person in the group chat. It is about not passing on something that wastes someone's time, frightens them, or costs them money. Five minutes, six questions, one decision: send it on, or let it stop with you.
Photo: MabelAmber / Pixabay
