In this video, we're going to go over the solution, or at least one of them.
So the exercise was to take this tweet and do an investigation.
Your task was to determine whether the tweet was legitimate and if it was based on the tweets content.
Figure out if it is legitimate or isn't, and basically verify your evidence and prove your findings
and write a report.
Finally.
Now, the way I went about it was I started by analyzing the poster.
I took a look at the previous post I made to determine how reliable they were and possible motives.
Also view the the replies to the post who liked the post, who shared it, etc..
I also noticed a hashtag.
I wasn't familiar with the active ebbs, so I did a little bit of checking on that.
I did some Google searches.
I also put it back into Twitter, which was the quickest thing to do, and Hashtag Active Ebbs, and
it came back with a lot of, uh, QAnon storm has arrived type posts associated with that hashtag.
So I did that also for my own curiosity, since I wasn't familiar with that particular hashtag.
I also took the user and fed it through bots, and we'll see if it was possibly a propaganda bot or
a or anything of that nature.
And it it came back with a pretty low rating.
So uh, most likely not a, not a bot.
Um, at least not according to this based after analyze its posts.
But.
It could be, could it be?
But for the most part, it it looks like it came back as a normal, normal poster.
I also took the time to save the the Twitter post on Wayback Machine in order to preserve the evidence.
So after that, I saved the photo to posted by the user that they posted up as evidence and I began
to test it for AI manipulation.
Uh, I also could have gone through to do see if there was if the photos were altered using Photoshop,
for example.
However, I didn't reach that step because I isolate each photo and did a reverse image search on each
of these.
Uh, in this case, I use Google images, which I actually found everything pretty quick.
So the first photo I found pretty quickly, including the blurred corner and all the data article was
one 1521.
It was.
It was taken from a um.
Article about the capital attacks.
During 2021.
And it talked about watching the Capitol building in place under extremely high tight security since
Donald Trump's supporters overran the halls.
So that's what the original photo was from.
The second photo came back and I found the exact photo used on Washington tunnels, which was 2002.
I'm sorry, 2004 was when that photo was taken.
The final photo I found was actually from protesters over human rights violation at Guantanamo Bay,
and that was on January 11th, 2021.
So all these different dates were different.
Uh, all these different photos were from different dates rather, and different events.
None of them happen at the same time.
And they all were completely unrelated incidents from what they, the original person posted.
Also there, unsurprisingly, there was no news stories to back up these claims that were made and the
previous posts that the user posted a lot of QAnon posts, those also never came to fruition.
So I labeled it false.
Now this was a pretty easy exercise.
However, I do think it was a good exercise in terms of how you can go about with your methodology and
hopefully your reporting.
I also hope you had fun with this.
And found it useful.
Finally, I want to say that despite how quick it is to find the evidence that none of that was actually
what the original posters said it was.
It didn't stop people from viewing it 1.1 million times, with 2753 reposts at the time that I.
Clip this.
5801 likes.
In 1931 bookmarks for a.
A story that was completely false.
Also, there were a lot of users that that backed up and supported what they said.
Now, of course, you can see on the bottom that that someone called them out, that they were surprised
and anyone would believe in this.
And there were there were other posts later on that that started coming up saying, hey, what are you
talking about?
Here's the evidence that that, um, shows that this story is completely false, which is great to see.
But again, we have 2753 repos with 5801 likes, which is probably gone up by since then if this post
is still up.
So that's a really frightening number.
And this is why Osint is extraordinarily important.
And again, I hope you found this interesting.
I hope you had fun with it and I hope it is useful for you in the future.
Thank you so much for watching.
Thanks for participating.
And.
How fun.
I'll see you soon.
And stay safe out there.