DigCit Tip: Reverse Image Search Pics that are Upsetting
How to fact check the source of your indignation before sharing
Images can effectively grab our emotions, especially when they are upsetting. And in this age of hot takes and information overload, it requires a lot of effort and will power to pump the brakes and carefully consider whether something in our feed that upsets us is, in fact, worth our outrage before sharing it to our own networks.
Misattribution of photographs is common. Sometimes, it is an unintentional mistake or the result of willful laziness by authors, editors and fact checkers. Other times, outright deception is the goal.
Regardless of intent on the producer side, responsible consumers of information have tools at our disposal to seize control. We can have agency over whether or not we will be dutiful sheep, obediently going along with untrustworthy shepherds.
One of these tools is Google’s reverse image search.
Using it couldn’t be easier. If you are on the Chrome browser, simply hover your mouse over the image, right-click, and select the “Search Google for Image” option.
This will open a new tab and provide you with an image search. It’s useful to see the various instances and sources of the image.
As the Pieter Howes Tweets shared above indicate, this may prove to us that images from unrelated events have been appropriated in order to deceive and manipulate our opinions and reactions.
Taking the time to exercise this diligence can also help unearth important nuance to a situation. For example, the detention of immigrant children separated from their parents and held in deplorable conditions dominated the news cycles in May of this year. One of the photographs that led to public outrage depicts two children fenced in and sleeping facedown on the floor. While the image is genuine, it was originally included in a 2014 story. For those taking the time to pay attention, this further contextualized the (mis)treatment of these children as being a longitudinal problem, not one limited to the scope of the current President’s administration.
Another use case could be in ensuring that students (and adults) properly attribute creators.
Recommended Reading: My friend Michelle Baldwin wrote this great post a few years ago about attribution and the importance that Educators model how not to steal.
Bryan Mathers is an educator and thought leader who I greatly admire. A lot of other people do too, though many don’t realize it because some folks crop his oft-shared “visual thinkery” and remove his signature. This behavior can cause injury to folks like Bryan: as a craftsman who makes his services available for hire, potential clients might not connect with him if they don’t know he’s behind the work they admire. When we see awesome visuals — especially those lacking attribution — taking the extra few seconds to search the image before sharing can help us responsibly verify whether it’s the most appropriate version to disseminate.
Digital Citizenship in this day and age is tough work that demands extra effort. Reverse image search is one tool at our disposal that requires us to go closer to an extra meter than extra mile, and doing so is worth the few additional moments of our time.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click to clap and recommend it to others! Your thoughts, questions and pushback our always appreciated as response posts. Please do share your own strategies to help with Digital Citizenship and preparing students to be responsible consumers online.
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium, you can find him at SenorG on Twitter.
