First Draft verification guide

Practical methods for checking where information came from and what context it may be missing.

First Draft’s verification material was built for people working with fast-moving online information. It breaks the task into concrete questions about provenance, source, date, location, and motivation. That makes it useful when a post, image, or video arrives without enough context and the first job is to work out what can actually be established.

The guide is strongest as a working checklist, not as a promise that every item can be resolved. Tools and platforms change, sources disappear, and some claims remain uncertain after a careful review. We link to it because its habits remain sound: preserve the original item, check context before amplification, and show the steps that support a conclusion.