That clip looks real. How would I even know?

Consistency is the difficult part

A still picture has to be plausible once. A video has to be plausible and then agree with itself, frame after frame, while things move.

That is where it shows. A background that quietly rearranges itself. A hand that becomes a different hand. Something that passes behind a lamppost and comes out slightly wrong, or does not come out at all.

Longer clips are harder than short ones, which is why so much of what you see is a few seconds long. When you notice that a clip ended sooner than it needed to, that is sometimes why.

ORBIT / THE NAVIGATOR

I have watched a generated seagull walk behind a bin and come back out as a different seagull. Nobody in the comments noticed.

The tells are a snapshot, not a skill

Every list of giveaways published in the last few years has aged badly. Count the fingers. Watch for blinking. Look at the teeth. Each was true, each got fixed, and each is now carried around by people who believe they are protected.

That is the specific harm of teaching detection: it does not leave somebody neutral when it expires. It leaves them confident. They check for the thing they learned, do not find it, and conclude the video is genuine.

So treat any tell you are given, including the ones two paragraphs above, as a description of what is currently awkward rather than a test you can rely on.

Check the route, not the pixels

The useful question is not whether the video looks real. It is where it came from and who else has it.

A clip of something genuinely newsworthy will exist in more than one place, from more than one source, and usually from somebody whose job depends on getting it right. A clip that exists only in the message you were sent is telling you something before you have watched a frame.

Search for the claim in words rather than the video in pixels. If a well-known person supposedly said something extraordinary, the absence of anybody else reporting it is the answer.

When it is about you

Generated video of a real person, doing or saying something they did not, is the sharpest end of this, and most of it is aimed at women.

If it happens to you, the platform's own reporting route is usually the fastest thing available, because platforms are obliged to act on it. Keep what you can: links, screenshots, the account name, the dates.

In the UK the Revenge Porn Helpline handles intimate image abuse for adults and will deal with the platforms on your behalf. If it involves anybody under eighteen, that is the Internet Watch Foundation and the police, not a reporting form.

See it for yourself

Reading about it only gets you so far. This one is written to show you the thing described above, rather than describe it again.

If you remember nothing else

• Video is the hardest to fake well, and the gap is closing fastest.
• Every giveaway you have been taught has an expiry date nobody tells you.
• Where a clip came from beats what it looks like, every time.
• A clip that exists in only one place has answered your question.
• If it is of you, report to the platform first and keep the evidence.