How we verified the first images at the scene of the funicular crash in Lisbonpublished at 11:33 British Summer Time
Emma Pengelly and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify
As soon as the news broke last night about the funicular crash in central Lisbon our late shift was tasked with finding and verifying images and footage from the scene.
We started looking for social media posts showing what happened that could be fed into the BBC News live page and passed to producers working on TV news.
Here are some steps we take to verify material
When we find social media posts purporting to be from the scene of a breaking news story we first check that the images or footage are current by carrying out reverse image searches.
This means taking a series of grabs from the video and putting them into Google Images.
If it doesn’t find any matching images then we can be confident it’s new, not old material being reused.
Once this is done, we can check the location from where the footage was filmed or picture taken.
This may already be incorporated in a post but we need to check to be absolutely sure it’s from where it claims to be from.
We do this by using Google Maps in the first instance.
If we have a good idea where the incident took place we can check street level imagery using tools like Google Street View.