There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.

You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.

You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.

There are vast archives of printed material to help you.

The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.

Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.

Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.

Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.

Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.

While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.

I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.

And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).

Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.

The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.

To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.

I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.

But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.

This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.

The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.

I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.

Stopping misinformation starts with you.

But is it too good to be true?

The first thing to do with any image of a text quote is to search for the text.

Look, I'm not saying tumblr isn't great, but… I wouldn't exactly trust it as a primary source!

That said, tumblr has a neat feature which makes it easy to see where a popular image originally was posted.

In this case it appears to have originated at Yesterday In Print

There's nothing on the site which screams "spoof" or "fake". The site FAQ claims it posts genuine newspaper clippings.

In this case, from "The Evening Star, Washington DC, October 16, 1918"

The USA's Library of Congress has a good collection of old local newspapers. They're all scanned and OCR'd.

Here's The Evening Star, Washington DC, October 16, 1918.

Rather than labouriously read through each thrilling page, it is possible to search for the "many a man" phrase directly.

Hey presto! There's the quote on page 6

Is the trail complete? Perhaps.

You can argue whether you think the Library of Congress is a trustworthy source, and you can contact Louisiana State University to see if the original paper is in their records, and you can believe the Illuminati have rewritten history. But you'll do so from a place of informed knowledge - rather than from a graphic which could have been manipulated.

The whole investigation took me 5 minutes. A Web search, a few clicks, and some ctrl+f'ing.

These are basic skills, and you should use those skills before you share something which sounds too good to be true.

Treat any claim without a URl as suspicious.

Every so often, one of "his" pearls of wisdom is regurgitated into my Twitter feed.

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

When you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others.

It's the same thing when you are stupid.

---

Except - and I hate to be a party pooper - this is a joke by the Belgian comedian Philippe Geluck. It has nothing to do with Feynman.

(From 1995's "Ma langue au chat")

Go on. Search all of Feynman's published works. You won't find that phrase in there.

Or, take these "quotes" - which just appear to be trite "Live Laugh Love"-style clichés.

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

So many years of education yet nobody teaches us how to love ourselves.

---

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

Replacing 'Why is this happening to me?' with 'What is this trying to tell me?' is a game changer.

Learn from your experiences! 🧠

---

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously. 🧠

---

I can't find any evidence in Feynman's works that he said these things. So why do people follow and promote these ghoulish accounts?

When this account was created, in 2017, its first few Tweets all appear to be genuine Feynman quotes:

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. pic.x.com/r3njqsI9Hk

---

Although it occasionally veered off into pretending to be an actual person

Prof. Feynman

@ProfFeynman

Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!

---

At some point, the people running the account got bored of publishing the same old quotes repeatedly and started using some very dubious sources for their publication.

Now it just churns out any old inspiring rubbish - mixed with a few genuine quotations.

It reminds me of when Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" started. Fans created accounts for the fictional journalists.

https://twitter.com/MaggieJordanACN/status/225857203414904835

Will McAvoy

@WillMcAvoyACN

If I see one more so-called "news organization" talk about the "zombie apocalypse", I swear I am going to eat someone's face off.

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Then, inexplicably, those fan-accounts started tweeting about real events as though they were actual journalists.

President trump is a convicted felon

@MaggieJordanACN

Private Medical Staffing Companies Owned by Rich Investors Cut Doctor Pay and Now Want Bailout Money propublica.org/article/medica…propublica.org
Medical Staffing Companies Owned by Rich Investors Cut Doctor Pay and Now Want Bailout Money
Companies that employ emergency room medical personnel, many owned by private equity firms, say they are reeling from vanishing demand for non-coronavirus care. But critics worry that bailout money...

---

Will McAvoy

@WillMcAvoyACN

Plain Dealer Put Out to Pasture. In Final Death Blow to Plain Dealer, Remaining Reporters Given Impossible Choice clevescene.com/scene-and-hear…

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Do people know that those accounts aren't from real journalists? Do they care?

Similarly, do people think that Feynman account is somehow official or endorsed by his estate? Do they think it only tweets out Feynman's thoughts?

Following the "Feynman" account is like having a "quote of the day" calendar. It's a fine way to consume micro-slices of information. But in an era of fake news, we all need to be a little more careful about the sources we follow - especially when they claim to speak on behalf of others.

In a recent article, the BBC described Christine Lagarde thusly:

The role is likely to test the silver-haired 63-year-old, who has admitted before that she lacks economic experience.

The commentator was disgusted that she'd be described as "silver-haired". He wondered out loud "I bet the BBC don't refer to men in this way!"

Luckily, we can test that claim by searching BBC news for that phrase. Here's what I found (restricting myself to stories where the reporter described the subject as "silver-haired", and where the subject was a prominent figure.)

As you can see - the majority of the first 20 results are male. Lagarde is unique in being mentioned twice.

But don't just take my word for it! Run the search yourself and see.

Now, there are some obvious caveats. The BBC (probably) runs more stories about men than women - so the small number of women may be disproportionately targetted. The BBC's search engine doesn't let you specify the order of results - so I may have missed some stories.

I also didn't check whether it was male or female reporters who used the term. Feel free to explore that yourself.

The commentator quickly apologised and deleted his Tweet before it had hit peak virality in its outrage.

All that said, there are lots of outdated and weird sexist tropes that infect the media. Women are often described in a way that a man wouldn't me. Men are rarely "leggy blonds" or "ditzy". They never have "ample curves" or "flawless skin and dazzling eyes".

Language matters. When we reduce people to their mere looks, we do them a disservice. Reporters should avoid these cliches like the plague.

But... We live online. It's up to you to fact check your own assumptions.

WOW! Right! Nature is Coooooool! Or is it? If "The Planet Today" were a reputable source of news, they would tell us who the photographer was. Or where the shot was taken. Or... well... anything about the photo. But they're just a clickbait farm, so we have to go digging ourselves.

A "Reverse Image Search" site allows you to send it an image and it will find all the occurrences of it on the web. Nifty! My favourite is TinEye.com but you can also use Google Image Search.

Using TinEye, we can sort for the oldest image on the web. That's a good way to track where it came from.

Here we can see that the uncropped photo first appeared in 2014 - and it has bounced around the Internet ever since, variously being cropped, filtered, captioned, and misattributed.

The original seems to be from this imgur user, who has only ever uploaded one photo. What happens when we search for the uncropped image itself?

That quickly takes us to websites where people claim that this is a still from the film In The Heart of the Sea.

They're thematically similar - but not identical. Within the discussion, one of the contributors says:

Posted this before but it looks a lot like this image.

Auroren on Reddit

That does look strikingly similar to the original image. Let's compare them side-by-side:

The boats are the same. The foam in the bottom left is the same. The waves are the same. But one image has had a whale digitally inserted into it. I wasn't able to conclusively find the person who took the original photo - but it is safe to say, the image on Facebook has been manipulated.

I don't think this specific Facebook group is trying to convince people to vote for their political party, or sway opinion about a matter of importance. But I think they are teaching people to be unquestioning about the media they consume.

Tracking down this image took me less than two minutes using my phone. It doesn't take a lot of skill. Ideally, media producers would take a little bit of time before they go fishing for clicks. Alternatively, platforms like Facebook could attempt to link back to the original images. Or, just perhaps, people could take a moment to check before sharing content.