News Guard is the publisher of this resource. Branding itself as "The Internet Trust Tool," News Guard is an organization that provides various tools for verifying misinformation online. Key features of News Guard include ratings of online articles based on their nine journalistic standards, news literacy education resources, and background information tools to analyze articles' site ownership.This student guide is one of several resources offered by NewsGuard, funded by Microsoft.

Photographs and other images circulate rapidly online and are often gripping, persuasive forms of evidence. It is difficult to tell if these images accurately depict what their posters claim they do, and it is often tempting to take these images at face value. If we trust images without verifying their accuracy, we risk believing false claims and narratives.

This lesson introduces students to a strategy for learning more about online images: the reverse image search. Students can use this tool to learn more about an image, including where else it has been posted online and what (if any) stories have been written about it. Students practice this strategy in groups, using the Internet to learn more about a single image posted within it.

This resource is published by Youth & Media.This learning experience has been created by Youth and Media and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. For more information, please visit: http://dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu/about. This "What Is Verification?" learning experience is inspired by the “Quick Start To Verifying Online Media” and “Verification Training For Journalists” courses by Dr. Claire Wardle at First Draft, available here.