Fake News

A Collection of Tips for Combating Online Misinformation 

To celebrate International Fact-Checking Day on April 2, 2022, the Snopes newsroom compiled some tools to help you navigate the internet like a pro. Click HERE to access.


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Image taken from https://www.librarygirl.net. Created by Jennifer LaGarde


Melissa Zimdars's Tips for Analyzing News Sources

The weekend after the United States presidential election, Melissa Zimdars, a professor at Merrimack College, learned that the top result returned by a Google search about the election's popular vote was to an article claiming that Trump carried the popular vote. Not true. Hillary Clinton had over one million more votes than Trump. This article was on an untrustworthy news site and caused Professor Zimdars to compile suggestions on how to spot a fake news site. Her suggestions are:

  • Avoid websites that end in “lo” (e.g., Newslo). These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of satire or comedy).
  • Watch out for websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources.
  • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event.
  • Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.
  • Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification.
  • Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs).
  • Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on Snopes or Wikipedia for more information about the source.
  • Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources.
  • If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
  • If the website you’re reading encourages you to DOX individuals, it’s unlikely to be a legitimate source of news.
  • It’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get a variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources not yet included in this list (although their practices at times may qualify them for addition), such as The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Fox News, vacillate between providing important, legitimate, problematic, and/or hyperbolic news coverage, requiring readers and viewers to verify and contextualize information with other sources.

Other tips for evaluating news sources

Click here to view http://rubberduck.media/how-to-identify-fake-news/
As a precaution, Firefly only embeds content that has a certificate to prove it's sent over the web securely.


A game which tests your news sense:

Click here to view http://factitious.augamestudio.com/#/
As a precaution, Firefly only embeds content that has a certificate to prove it's sent over the web securely.

Following is a list of reliable fact-checker websites:

FactCheck - General Fact Checker<http://factcheck.org/>

Fair - Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting<https://fair.org/>

HoaxSlayer - eMail, Internet Hoaxes <https://destiny.oakland.k12.mi.us/common/servlet/HoaxSlayer.com>

·OpenSecrets - eMail, Internet Hoaxes <https://destiny.oakland.k12.mi.us/common/servlet/OpenSecrets.Org>

· PolitiFact - Specialist in Politics and Government <http://www.politifact.com/>

· Poynter Institute - Credible, Evidence Based Content <http://www.poynter.org/>

· Snopes - General Fact Checker <http://www.snopes.com/>

· SourceWatch - Track corporations and PR spin <https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch>

· SunlightFoundation - Government and Politics <http://sunlightfoundation.com/>

· TruthOrFiction - eMail Reality Check <https://destiny.oakland.k12.mi.us/common/servlet/TruthOrFiction.com>

Fact Check Explorer is a free tool from Google that anyone can use to explore the veracity of claims made on the Internet. As you can see in my brief video embedded below, on Fact Check Explorer you can enter a topic or name then see a list of articles accompanied by notations about the accuracy of the claims in those articles. You can click through to the source of each article and the fact checker.