Send us a file

Sending a tip

The best tips are a photograph plus a claim that keeps getting repeated without anyone ever resolving it. What genuinely speeds up an investigation:

The image itself, or a link to where you saw it. The original posting is often the fastest route to the answer, because the earliest instance usually carries the real caption.
The claim as you saw it stated, in its own words. We work from how a story is actually told, not from a tidied version.
Where it is circulating — which platform, roughly when, and whether it seems to be spreading now or resurfacing.
Anything you already checked, including dead ends. Those save real time.

You do not need to know whether it is true. Working that out is the entire job. A tip that turns out to be straightforwardly real is just as useful as one that turns out to be a hoax — often more so.

What we cannot take on

Some subjects are outside what this format can handle responsibly, and a tip about them will get a polite no rather than a slow silence: medical and health claims, living private individuals, active elections and live legal proceedings, ongoing missing-persons cases, and conspiracy narratives targeting an ethnic, religious, or national group. The reasoning is on the method page.

Reporting an error

Put the file number in the subject line if you have it. A source that contradicts us is worth far more than an assertion that we are wrong — lead with the record and we will read it. Confirmed errors are corrected in place, dated, and added to the publiccorrections ledger.

Image rights

If you are a photographer, archive, or rights holder and believe an image here is used outside its licence, write to the address above with the file number and the image. We record a licence and its evidence page for every image we publish, and we will send you that record. If we got it wrong, the image comes down while it is sorted out rather than after.

Press and permissions

Requests to reproduce our writing, and questions about the verification method, go to the same address. Note that our licence to use an image does not extend to you — image rights have to be cleared with the original holder, whose details are recorded on every file.