The specialist team use open-source intelligence (gathering and analysing publicly available information), satellite imagery, data analysis and forensic techniques to debunk information that is usually about areas of conflict including Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran.
“More and more, we're being fed information that we don't really understand – from every single angle. Finding out what’s true is really hard,” Thomas explains. “Misinformation doesn't always spread because people are trying to twist a narrative – they are sharing things because they're worried or care about a particular issue, but in doing so, they’re acting really quickly. It all contributes to such a bad information economy.”
BBC Verify’s aim is to give its audience the full picture, saying what it knows, what it doesn’t know and how it knows, providing answers for the who, what, when, where and why questions.
She joined the BBC as a Creative Access trainee, starting off in radio, then climate disinformation.
“A classic example is wildfires,” she says. “You’ll see people sharing videos of wildfires saying, ‘This is in XYZ,’ but it’s actually a video from years ago. We had it a lot with misinformation about strikes between India and Pakistan. By doing a simple reverse image search, you’ll see it’s not true and it’s old.”
Geolocation is purely down to the human eye if you’re trying to find out where something is. “You’re looking for clues: a pylon, an intersection of a field, the direction of sunlight to help with timing,” says Thomas. “It is down to gut instinct. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Does this feel like it’s real?’ It’s better to be cautious than not. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
If you’re unsure, it’s best to visit a trusted news source. BBC Verify’s stories are put out on television, radio, digital and social media. “We are trying to reach people where they are, so we're doing more and more social media videos to try and debunk or cut through the noise of what's happening in a particular place.
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Meet the BBC's last reporter remaining in Russia: "It feels like we're in the eye of the storm"I'm Cathy Newman, and this is how I'm embracing our new political landscape with my brand new showOthers can take much longer. “With a very foggy, misty video in Ukraine over some fields, where the only thing you can see is a pylon, we try to find any other videos that might be easier to verify to help us understand what's happening. If not, we plough on with that same video and just keep going.”
As part of the job, Thomas often deals with really graphic material. She says the story she’s proudest to have worked on is when sources shared a secret folder full of hundreds of faces of victims who were killed by the Iranian government. The close-up images leaked to BBC Verify were taken from inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre.
Some of the people had multiple pictures taken of them from different angles. After analysing 392 photos, BBC Verify identified 326 people. In that instance, they explained why they couldn't share more about how they knew what they knew to protect their sources.
“In a situation where we still don't really know what's happened, and the death toll, and with so many different numbers flying around of how many people have been killed, when it’s so hard to get information about what’s happening on the ground, to be able to bring some clarity and some information that we painstakingly verified – that's when I feel like my work is impactful. It has the power to bring information and clarity where there's a lot of confusion and misinformation.”
“There are loads of AI detection tools, and we are developing our own, but they are developing much slower and are nowhere near as good as the AI being used to generate those images, videos and audio.”
While the BBC remains a major source of news in the UK, a 2026 study by the Good Growth Foundation think tank found that public trust in the BBC has plummeted more over the last decade than any UK institution except for the government, with 50 per cent of the public trusting the corporation less than 10 years ago.
“Where necessary, we will make changes to our output. We aim to be as transparent as possible for audiences, and publish updates that reflect any changes we make.”
Thomas says, “We always prioritise accuracy over fastness. We have peer reviews to make sure that everything is double-checked before it gets to the editing stage. Then we do AI checks.”
View oEmbed on the source website“It’s really hard, it’s a challenge,” Thomas admits of her role, “but we are a team that's totally up for it. I'm really proud of what we do. I genuinely feel really privileged to be able to work on the stories that I do. We have a responsibility to deliver the truth.”
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