How to protect yourself from fake news online

The first step is honing your sense of when a given piece of content is too good (or bad) to be true. Once you start looking, you’ll notice specific sub-types of this content — like "ragebait" designed to get traffic from people’s anger, hyper-partisan appeals that twist the facts, or outright scams. The techniques are relatively common across different types of story, and they’re not hard to recognize.

Outside these specific cases, the general technique is simple: if a story really grabs your attention for any reason, slow down and look closer.

• You have a strong emotional reaction
• The story seems ridiculous OR perfectly confirms your beliefs
• You'll spend money as a result
• You immediately want to share the story

Once you’ve decided to look more deeply at a story online, it’s time to figure out where and when it comes from. Internet news can work like a game of telephone: every time somebody re-posts or rewrites something, there’s a chance that important details will get lost.

The first step in that process is finding the date of the original story — which is one of the most helpful pieces of information you can get. If the story’s being shared in a Facebook post or a tweet, click on the post and find its date, otherwise known as the timestamp. You should also look for the source of the relevant information. Sometimes a news story will explicitly cite its sources, whether that’s by making clear that the author performed firsthand research and interviews, or by linking to a press release or another news outlet. If it’s the latter, just click through to see where the information is coming from, and make sure to check the timestamp on that as well. What you're reading may have been true 5 years ago, but not now.

Sometimes, though, it’s unclear where news originated — a story might print an inflammatory quote without saying where or when it’s from, or a Twitter account might share a photo with a description that might be wrong. In those cases, do a quick search for more coverage and original sourcing.

• Check the verification
• Look for names and keywords
• Find survey and infographic sources
• Search for quotes
• Identify photos and videos
• Consider how time-sensitive the story is
• See if an old story is still accurate

There’s a term called “context collapse” that’s very useful when discussing internet news. Popularized by scholar Danah Boyd, it describes how the internet “flattens multiple audiences into one” — if you’re browsing Twitter, for example, an offhand comment from your friend sits right alongside a statement from the president of the United States. Internet news suffers from its own variation of context collapse: no matter how far away or long ago a story happened, it can sound like it’s happening right now, in your neighbourhood.

This can go horribly awry. In January 2019, a local TV station said law enforcement was looking for a human trafficking suspect around Waco, Texas. A radio station employee summarized the story with a more urgent headline — “Suspected Human Trafficker, Child Predator May Be in Our Area” — and posted it on Facebook.

The writer wanted to raise local awareness about a criminal on the loose. Instead, as Slate author Will Oremus explains, his story got out of control. It was shared hundreds of thousands of times across the country, likely by users who thought “our area” referred to their town instead of Texas. The suspect was apprehended soon after, and the article was updated. But people kept sharing the original post for weeks, because it sounded scary and urgent — apparently, too urgent to check and see if the danger was gone.

Some online disinformation is blatantly fake or misleading. But other stories are more subtly wrong. They might omit important details, blow small controversies out of proportion, or use legitimate news to attract people before feeding them bad information.

The key here is looking for gaps in a story, or mismatches between a story’s claims and its actual source material. These might be honest mistakes — like accounts sharing satirical news without realizing it. Or they might be a deliberate attempt to fool people.

• Is it satire?
• Who’s providing the information?
• What’s the scale of the story?
• If there’s an “outrage,” are people actually upset?
• How do different news outlets present the story?
• Are important facts getting left out or distorted?
• What’s the larger narrative?
• What happens if you’re wrong?
• Why share this story?

Just like in conflict, there's a person's presentation of a story, and then there are the facts.

Breaking news stories can be unreliable because nobody — including government officials and other authorities — knows yet what’s going on.

If you share stories on social media, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually post something that’s inaccurate or misleading, even if you’re diligently doing research.

That doesn’t mean that nothing is true or that every site is equally fake. You might see a bad story from an outlet that carefully outlines its sources, explains the context of an event, and corrects mistakes when it finds them. You’re much more likely to see a bad story from an outlet that posts context-free rumours and doesn’t explain where it’s getting information. If you read a site regularly over time, you’ll get a better sense of how much to trust it.

Here's an example of the media putting their spin on a story that may make its readers jump to conclusions, while not actually saying anything incorrect. The BBC ran a story on 3 Dec 2019 titled: "FaceApp may pose 'counterintelligence threat' says FBI"

The story went on to suggest that a US Senator (Chuck Schumer) asked the FBI if FaceApp is safe.The FBI responded "it considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, to be a potential counterintelligence threat".

The app was developed by Wireless Lab, a company based in St Petersburg. The company previously said it does not permanently store images, and does not collect troves of data - only uploading specific photos selected by users for editing.

But is it safe? The article seems to hint that it may not be, only because it was developed in Russia. But is it fair to suggest that all Russian software is risky? All the app does is take your photo and modify it using AI to make you look different.

Of course, security experts would suggest that it's possible that the point of the software is to practise the art of modifying 'western' cultural faces as a practise run for using the technology to create fake news meant to provoke the hearts and minds of westerners. But nobody has any proof that this is true. But I bet that just reading those words has made some of you start freaking out about using the app.

And that's the point of fake news - tweak your emotions so that you react irrationally.