The five questions
Every piece of footage has to answer five questions before it can carry weight: Who filmed it? When was it filmed? Where was it filmed? What does it actually show? Why was it published, and by whom?
You will rarely answer all five with certainty. The aim is to know which ones you have answered, and to say plainly which ones you have not.
Find the first upload
Most footage reaches you secondhand: reposted, cropped, watermarked by an aggregator and given a new caption. Work backwards. Take a few clear frames and run them through more than one reverse image search engine. Search the platforms where footage from that conflict usually appears first, using place names in the local language and spelling.
The earliest copy you can find is your best evidence for the date and the uploader. If an older copy exists, the new caption is wrong, however confident it sounds.
Date it
Platforms strip most embedded metadata, so the date usually has to be reasoned out.
- First appearance gives a latest possible date.
- Shadows give the sun's direction and height; with a known location and orientation they narrow the time of day and the season.
- Weather and season can be checked against historical weather records and against satellite imagery for snow, flooding or leaf cover.
- Changes in the scene, such as a destroyed building, a new trench line or a repaired road, can be bracketed with dated satellite images.
Recycled footage is the most common failure in conflict verification. Video from an earlier war, a different country or a training exercise is regularly passed off as new.
Place it
Geolocation means matching what is visible in the footage to a specific spot on a map. Start broad and narrow down.
- List distinctive features: road junctions, rail lines, towers, mosques and churches, tree lines, field patterns, hills, rivers, shop signs.
- Use the claimed location as a hypothesis, not a fact, and search the surrounding area on satellite imagery and street-level photography.
- Match several features in the right arrangement, not just one. A single water tower proves little; a water tower, a bend in the road and a row of houses in the same relative positions proves a lot.
- Record the coordinates and the features you matched, so someone else can check your work.
Say only what it shows
Once you know where and roughly when, describe what the footage actually shows, no more. An explosion on video does not tell you what weapon caused it, who fired it or whether anyone was hurt. A destroyed vehicle may have been hit days earlier. Identifying equipment from blurry frames is a specialist skill, and confident misidentifications are common.
Keep the uploader's caption separate from your own findings. The caption is a claim.
Manipulation and generated video
Most misleading conflict footage is real footage with a false caption. Edited and generated video is a growing problem too. Warning signs include inconsistent shadows, text that does not resolve into real words, objects that change shape between frames, and an absence of any earlier copy or any second angle on a supposedly major event.
No single test proves footage is genuine. Corroboration does: a second angle, satellite imagery showing the damage, or independent reports from the same place and time.
Grading your confidence
On BattleBytes, geolocated footage can lift an event to our highest confidence level, shown as a solid ring. That means we are confident about the place and approximate time. Questions such as who fired or what the target was are reported separately, and labeled as claims until they are independently supported.