A few weeks ago I published an article on the topic “ a fact check is not an opinion ”. In this article I have described quite clearly how a fact check works and that the result does not represent an opinion. Many of the people commenting apparently didn't really understand this, so at this point I'll use a tangible example to show again why a fact check is not an opinion. It's about a fire in the Russian city of Tyumen.
At the beginning, however, let's talk about the definition of opinion, belief and knowledge.
We must clearly distinguish “opinion” from “belief” but also “knowledge”. An opinion is an impulse that suffices without any objective or subjective justification. I “mean” something. I mean, the color red doesn't suit you. I mean, we shouldn't go out in this weather. I can mean anything, but in the end it doesn't have to be true or it can't be proven. When it comes to faith, it's a slightly different matter. Faith is a belief that arises from subjective points of view. I can believe something because many people have already claimed this thing. I think the color red doesn't suit you because many other people have already told you so. I think we won't be able to leave the house tomorrow because several meteorologists have reported rain. But all of this is not yet knowledge. And now we move on to fact checking.
In a fact check, I check what we know or what we can know. On the other hand, I also have to say what we don't know and what we can't check. I can't know whether the color red suits you or not. These are subjective things. However, I can know whether a fashion expert has judged this and told you whether the color red suits you. I can't know if the weather tomorrow will be so bad that I won't be able to go out. However, I can know the day after tomorrow whether the weather yesterday (i.e. tomorrow) was so bad that I couldn't leave the house.
I hope I have explained the difference between opinion, belief and knowledge quite clearly at this point. And now let's get back to the topic of fact checking. A fact check is not an impulse that I mean anything about. A fact check shouldn't be something I believe, but only what I know.
We regularly receive videos and photos from various editorial teams. We should check these photos or videos briefly before the respective editorial teams use them. In my opinion, a very laudable undertaking and also the right path. Yesterday it was that time again when a claim that was circulating on social media and various Telegram channels was sent to us for verification. It was about “accidental” fires in Russia. Specifically, a fire at an industrial site in the Russian city of Tyumen.

The starting point is simply a claim from a Telegram channel, which originally written in Russian. My task in the fact check is to use this data to find out whether there was a fire there and to verify this fire accordingly or ultimately to falsify it.
A fact check of this extent means that I can have an opinion on the whole thing, but this opinion has absolutely nothing to do with whether I ultimately confirm that there was a fire in Tyumen or not. A fact check also has nothing to do with whether I can ultimately only believe that there was a fire in an industrial area because many others said so. For example in the comment columns. A fact check means that I myself must be able to demonstrate with sufficient evidence that this fire really took place on an industrial site in Tyumen.
Fact check fire in Tyumen
In this case we have to act on two levels. We first have to see whether there was even a fire on an industrial site in Tyumen. Therefore, we take the sparse information available to us and search using the right keywords in a search engine. The magic term here is “real keywords”.
For example, it's of little use to me if I throw "Russia Brand Tyumen" into the search engine. I get all sorts of results in which the respective search terms appear. So I have to search specifically and ideally enter the location and incident in a search engine. For international topics, it is generally advisable to search in the national language of the respective country, in this case even made more difficult by the Cyrillic characters.
So my search terms are “пожар Тюмени” (Fire Tyumen). Now I'm actually getting results. Now quickly apply the filter and say what time period this fire was supposed to have taken place in, and then I'll have pretty specific information. The time filters are important anyway because they allow me to limit the search results to a specific time window. In our case, we actually get concrete results, including photos that are said to have been published on the Russian social media network “VK” about the fire.
So we see that there was actually a fire in Tyumen in Russia and based on the media reports we even got a specific address and various other details that we can use to search even more closely. Because the next search consists of geolocating. We have to see whether this fire actually took place on the industrial site and whether the photos are consistent or not. Since we are dealing with Russian search results, a translation aid is always worth its weight in gold. In our case, we use the Deepl to translate an online article from the website “Tjumentoday.ru”. In it we find out:
Tonight there was a strong fire in the workshop of the Tyumen Mechanical Repair Plant in Tyumen on Kombinatskaya 46, not far from residential areas.
source
So Tyumentoday writes that there was a fire in the city on May 16 at 12:44 a.m. The alarm was received at 12:44 a.m. by the officer on duty. The fire was extinguished at 2:11 a.m. An 18 x 60 meter production hall burned. That's some important information. And in the article there is also a picture that was taken by a private individual and posted in the “VK ChS Tyumen” group on VK.
Next step is geolocating. This means I look at the image and look for different details. I usually find details outside of the actual topic. So the topic here is the fire. This means that I shouldn't be interested in the fire, but rather I have to pay attention to details that happen to be visible in the picture (or, in videos, come into the picture by panning). And this picture offers me a lot of details, I'll simply mark them in the following screenshots:

On the left side of the picture we see a house (1). This house has at least five floors. It has a light, apparently beige clinker brick. But it can also be white and reflect slightly reddish when exposed to fire. The ground floor is dark, with orange decoration above. On the right at the end of the decoration we see an illuminated sign, which is white with black writing in the left area and red or purple with white writing in the right area. Then we see street lights, three of them (2). These are round at the top. And now there is something very striking: we see decorations or paintings on the building at the bottom right (3).
What we don't see is the position of the sun. That's a shame, because you can always tell which direction is north based on the position of the sun. This simplifies the subsequent work with the map material and at least provides an idea of the direction in which we are looking in the picture. What we can see, however, is the time of day. It is night, which roughly confirms the timing of the fire. But nothing more at first.
Of course, we now want to use the details we found out. In our fact check we use the details as a basis for comparison. This means we are now looking for an aerial photo of the area using an online map service. Since we already know what address it is, we just need to look for the striking details in the area.
Now there are several ways to use an aerial photo of this region. Of course I can use the map service of the search engine Google. This works, but I should keep in mind that I am in Russia. In this respect, it makes more sense to open the map service of the Russian search engine Yandex. Right now, in the context of the Ukraine war, Yandex has much better aerial footage of Russia and Ukraine than Google does. There are of course other mapping services, but we'll limit ourselves to Yandex for this article and our fact check.
The area is very easy to find using the address from the Tyumentoday web article. But always remember: at this point we should work with the input “ Тюмени Комбинатской, 46 ” on Yandex. The maps also appear to be quite plausible. We are actually dealing with the relevant area here. And now it becomes clear how difficult it is to determine our camera position due to the lack of a north-south orientation. This means that we must at least be able to determine our position from a bird's eye view based on the details we observe. Here is the map (allow content):
Now it's time to look for the tall residential building and see if we have any panoramic photos or even street views somewhere. Since Yandex has quite extensive material within Russia, we actually have the option to open street views here. In the aerial photo it is already possible to identify some potential candidates for residential buildings that can be seen in the image.
Here is an important observation: in the corresponding place in Tyumen, the apartment blocks have been given different colors. That means we see blocks of flats that have a blue color, that have a green color, but are also decorated in orange. And now the decoration that can be seen between the 1st floor and the ground floor in the photo above with the fire comes into play. This decoration in the photo is orange, so we have already identified two potential candidates in the aerial photo:

Now we need to identify the exact camera location. At this point it is possible to open the street view. And this is where the big difference between Google Maps and the Yandex map service becomes apparent. Google Maps does not have any Street View data from this location. Yandex, in turn, offers a complete street view. This means that with the help of Yandex we can get to exactly where we want to go:
At this point we can clearly see from the street view that all the details we could make out in the photo match the street view. What's more, the distinctive decorations on the hall (mark 3 in the photo) are clearly visible. We can even now identify exactly which of the halls burned. The article from Tyumentoday provides us with fairly precise information, namely the size of the hall: an 18 x 60 meter production hall burned. Map services such as Google Maps and Yandex provide us with a distance tool. This is used here:

Based on the measurement, we see that the building that is burning in the photo and which was given as the address in the newspaper article has a size of 60.4 m x 21 m. This roughly corresponds to the information in the newspaper. So with the help of geolocating and various information from the search engines, we were able to find out exactly the point of view from which the photo was taken.
This certainly requires some prior knowledge. For example, knowing how to use search engines. What do I type, how do I type it, how do I apply filters. This means that I have to be able to get results in a targeted manner at all times and not just blindly search for something. I have to pay attention to the publication date of web content, I have to pay attention to how trustworthy the respective results are. I have to pay attention to the language in which they were written and use that language accordingly. If I really use all of this, in combination with other tools such as map services, then in the end I will get my result and can say: yes, there was a fire in Tyumen and a warehouse was affected.

A fact check is not an opinion.
And again, I have not published an opinion at this point. In the end, everything I found out about each tool is exactly what we know. Nobody “thinks” that this spot could be right, but I can prove that a photo was taken exactly there showing a burning hall in Tyumen.
It's also not about speculation in a fact check. I didn't blindly believe any information in comment columns because I am convinced that it is true. No, I have checked the facts myself and can sufficiently prove and replicate the events at will that this hall burned. And that is exactly the goal of a fact check. It perhaps provides the basis on which someone else (as far as I am concerned) can interpret something or speculate. But that's something other than a fact check. A fact check is simply not an opinion.
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

