Every user has probably encountered a situation where it was necessary to determine whether a photo found on the Internet is genuine or fake. Today I will talk about how you can determine whether a photo is fake using a few simple rules. This is necessary, for example, for a person who writes texts for websites or posts for social networks and uses pictures in them. A website or blog needs to be filled with quality content, then users will trust it and be more willing to visit it. In order to carry out the verification, the built-in capabilities of browsers, installed extensions or special online services are used.
Page age
Each VK page at the time of registration receives an ID, which, in essence, is its serial number. You can use it to calculate the approximate age of your account. Here are the detailed instructions:
- Go to a suspicious page and look at the address bar of your browser.
- After the “id” combination there is a combination of numbers, which is the account identification number.
- If the numeric ID has been changed to an alphabetic one, then from the user’s page you need to go to the section with his friends. The original combination will be reflected there.
Now you can determine the approximate registration date:
- If the page ID is close to 100,000,000, it means it was created around 2010.
- Pages with IDs of approximately 180,000,000 were registered in 2012.
- Accounts with an ID of about 281,000,000 are relatively young, created quite recently.
Accordingly, the page registered a couple of weeks ago deserves the closest attention. Such an account should not be trusted unconditionally. Most likely this is a fake.
Attention! Of course, the owners of such profiles come up with a variety of excuses to win over the user. For example, you can often hear: “The old page was blocked, so I created a new one.” However, access to the account is restored literally in a minute; to do this, it is enough to have access to the linked phone number. Or “I made the second page on purpose.” In this case, you can check the person’s trustworthiness by asking him to send you a message from his old account.
Doesn't write or read messages
Do you have any suspicions that the user being added to you is a fake? The best way to make sure of this is to write to him. Say hello, find out how he is doing. If he doesn’t answer you and doesn’t even read your message, then this is a fake. And the page was created to recruit an audience. A user who is hiding under someone else's face simply does not have time for you.
If they answered you, then chat and offer to call via video conference. Fortunately , such a function appeared on VKontakte a long time ago.
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Authenticity of photographs
As a rule, fake accounts copy photos from original pages. Or they take them from the same “illegal” profiles. At the same time, during the process of saving and loading, images lose sharpness and become less quality. Accordingly, the more often the photo was copied, the more blurry and dull it became. You can check authenticity using Google image search:
- Select one of the photos on the page and save it to your PC.
We recommend: How to close a VK page from strangers
- Upload this photo to the image search system and click the “Search” button.
- If a photo is found on the Internet very often, and the quality of the pictures posted there is noticeably higher, there is no doubt that the suspicious page on VKontakte is fake.
Attention! To make the verification results even more convincing, you need to analyze several profile photos.
List of friends and subscribers
Next, look at the list of friends. For fake accounts it often looks like this:
Sometimes fakes monitor their accounts and delete blocked users. Here you can go through his friends, if you come across a lot of advertising accounts, pay attention to this.
Pay attention to the number of subscribers.
If a person has a lot of followers, he is not necessarily a fake, but you will not receive any benefit or communication from him. Over time, he will simply unfriend you and you will become another subscriber. Why do they do this , you ask - the more subscribers a page has, the higher it ranks in the search for a contact.
Checking the activity of a user's friends
Each VK user has a certain number of friends who from time to time like and repost content on his page. The higher the popularity of a page, the more user activity there is on it. Fake pages usually do not contain comments, there are no hearts from other people.
However, do not forget that scammers can use services to gain subscribers and friends, whose accounts must also be carefully checked.
note
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What online services allow you to check photos for uniqueness?
The most well-known and accessible services for users to check the originality of photographs are the following:
- "Image edited?" (“Has the picture been edited?”)
- "Find exif"
- "Photo Forensics".
Comparative characteristics of the three services listed above.
| Service | Address | The essence of the action | Paid/free | Upload file/Enter address |
| Image edited? | https://imageedited.com/ | The service gives a short answer to the question. “Yes, the picture was edited”, “No, it was not edited.” | It also works in the free version, but provides more detailed and accurate information in the full version. | Requires you to upload a file from your computer. |
| Find exif | https://www.findexif.com/ | Metadata is the technical side of any photograph. You can see the brand of camera or phone, the date and even the location of the shooting. | For free | Requires you to enter the image address, that is, it only works with files available online |
| Photo Forensics | https://fotoforensics.com/ | Allows you to find out whether individual elements have been added or removed from the photo. For example, whether tourists have been “removed” from their vacation photos. | The service is free, but for advanced or commercial use it requires registration. | Both files from the computer and addresses of online images. |
Uniqueness of the text: why it is needed and what programs to check
Eyewitness accounts
Often eyewitness accounts are difficult or impossible to verify, but there are exceptions.
Listen to the testimony of eyewitnesses - is there any confirmation in their speech of the theses that journalists are trying to convey to you, or are they talking about general things that the media then use for their own purposes. For example, in the story with the yacht that we have already mentioned, NTV employees also say that another businessman, a Donetsk aviation instructor, donated a plane to the militia. At the same time, as it turned out later, the instructor answered general questions from journalists about airplanes and parachute jumps and did not give anyone anything. Later, he even recorded a video message about this.
Another such example of twisting words is the story of the Russia Today TV channel, which talked about the flight of Jews from Kyiv due to the anti-Semitism of the new Ukrainian government. The channel’s employees even showed Rabbi Misha Kapustin packing his things and saying that he was forced to flee from the impending danger. But if you listen to his words, you will find that for some reason he does not say from which particular side he fears danger. And if you look for information about Kapustin, you will find out that he is the rabbi of a synagogue not in Kyiv, but in Simferopol; he previously made a public request to protect Ukraine and Crimea from Russia, and is now fleeing from Crimea from the new Russian government.
Also pay attention to the eyewitness himself - whether you have seen him before. Like, for example, the famous “tourist” Maria Tsipko, who regularly gives comments to the media in the guise of a resident of Odessa, Donbass, or almost any other hot spot.
How to spot a fake
A significant percentage of information about high-profile events, in our case - about the confrontation in Ukraine - does not correspond to reality. The main reason for this is its use for the purposes of state propaganda: in this case, news reports are used not to inform people, but to impose on them opinions beneficial to one force or another. In this material we will try to highlight the main methods of recognizing untruths in the media.
Let us immediately make a reservation that we try to work with proven facts, and not with statements of one party or another. That is, if, for example, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declares about some event in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Defense refutes this statement without providing evidence of its position, we find ourselves in a situation of “word against word” - two interested parties say what they want profitable. That is why there are so few verbal refutations on our resource - they are only possible when someone refutes information that is beneficial to him (for example, when Donetsk militias denied the seizure of Grad installations, which was reported by the Russian TV channel LifeNews, which is loyal to them). Therefore, we will try to talk about facts.
It all started a long time ago
To begin with, I would like to turn to history and remember how, even in times distant from our days, people learned to copy and create fakes of valuable things.
If an exquisite thing appeared, worthy of attention and interest, then one could certainly find some copies and analogues of it.
The forgery concerned everything: cards, paintings, jewelry, dishes.
And, if in those days it was a big nuisance to buy a fake, now many people consciously purchase analogues and copies.
Manufacturers of counterfeits (for example, such well-known brands as Adidas, Puma, Apple, Samsung, etc.) receive a number of advantages, and, accordingly, easy promotion and quick money.
Some scammers resort to such tricks as replacing letters in the name or slightly changing the logo. It seems like a new brand, nothing was stolen, but it’s not fair, you’ll agree.
What are they needed for
The main goal of fakes is profit. Money is drawn from the people in all possible ways.
There may be entire fake online stores. The client selects the product he needs, pays, waits... and only over time understands the sadness of the events.
Shopping on the Internet should be done on trusted sites!
Another common purpose of creating left-wing (also called fake) is to comment and bring discussion participants into dialogue.
Often comments can be paid for, especially of a political nature.
This phenomenon is called “Trolling”. If you come across an annoying, stubborn, catchy commentator, know that this is a troll. It’s better to ignore them in order to keep your nerves in order.
