This week we found a video posted to X of a crowd of women wearing nikabs (veil worn by Muslim women covering their entire bodies and faces) walking past a tall brick wall. The caption said this was filmed in London.
I suspected this wasn't the case in reality, but at first glance there was not much footage dissenting the allegations filmed in the UK.
All we could see in the background were walls, trees and the edges of a blurry building in the distance.
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Step 1: Reverse image search
The first call when you try to geolocate an image or video is that we are verifying the facts with all visual media. Finding the oldest results often reveals its original source and the context in which it was first shared.
However, in this case, direct reverse image search via Google took me to a Tiktok video with location markers for “Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro” in Indonesia.
Image courtesy of perfect facts
Internet searches revealed that Altafatatenboro is an Islamic boarding school (such schools are known in Indonesia as “Pesantren”). A crowd of this size wearing Niqabs is not uncommon in this context. Indonesia has a large Muslim population.
Does AI help geologicalize?
However, at this stage of fact checking, it is still attribution of one account to another account. What we really needed was to match the same site shown in the video with the location on the map.
On Facebook, I found slightly different edits of videos similar to women in Islamic dresses to look like the same region, but more geographical features are visible, including signs and clearer views of the buildings.
Using stills from this video as reference, I asked the AI Chatbot ChatGpt if they could provide coordinates for that location using a possible location at the Alpha Taha School in Indonesia.
A study by BellingCat's open source research experts earlier this year found that AI tools could be advocate for globalizing images, but this is not an open goal, and because hallucinations are possible (when models generate misinformation or competing information and are often presented with confidence). This research reaffirmed everything it said to us.
I was able to find a Google Street View match in the location shown in one of the other clips in the compilation using the coordinates provided by ChatGpt. This is in the middle of the gate to the Al-Fatah school dorms.
However, this did not match where we were trying to fact check, or anywhere near. I was very confident that the video was filmed in Tenboro, but I needed to do further research to prove this.
There was little identification within the shared clip, and it was not sufficient to proceed to ChatGpt or any other large language model we tested to provide matching coordinates.
However, there are walls, diagonal entrances, and trees line the streets. Using high-quality clips from the same location, we could also identify the tiled building in the background with green lintels around the window, leading to the conclusion that the streets the woman was walking on were pretty straight.
Find a match
These features were cross-referenced in Temboro satellite images to identify matching streets east of the school's campus. When I saw Google Street View this road, it was the perfect match. After hours of blindfolded and looking in the dark, this concrete evidence is a fist pump moment for our fact checkers.
Why this work is important
While such false footage takes only a few seconds to gain traction, the process of finding the truth takes much longer and may not be possible for casual internet users.
When this comes to publishing such clips to stem the trend of misinformation on the Internet, full fact news and professional fact checkers from online teams are essential.
