Review the web address or URL. If you see an address that is unfamiliar, do a little digging.
There are websites that spoof legitimate news sites - mimic the site's layout, logo and even have a web address that is similar enough to the legitimate website. Be wary of fake news sites sometimes have domains that are very close to real news sites.
Abcnews.go.com -- the real ABC news website
Abcnews.com.co -- the fake ABC news website
If words like “.wordpress” or “blogger” are in the domain that usually signifies it’s a personal blog rather than a news source.
In other social media platforms you may have to scrutinize the username as well. In late 2016, there was an announcement from what appeared to be a BBC twitter account declaring that Queen Elizabeth II had died. It was shared thousands of times before people started to notice that the username was a variation on the real BBC twitter username. The real BBC twitter username is: @BBCNews and this account was tweeting from @BBCNewsUKI a close enough match that it fooled thousands of people.
Look for an "About Us" page and read it.
Be wary of websites that don't tell you about the website.
There are websites that have, at first glance, innocuous content. For example, this Martin Luther King website which lists historical writings and "the truth" about King. But look closer.. at the bottom of the page there is a link that states that this website is hosted by Stormfront.
When you click on the link, you are sent to a neo-Nazi website.
Does the website have a lot of ads? Flashing banners? Pop up ads?
A great deal of money is made by websites through advertising. When you visit a website with lots of ads, you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of the website? To transmit news? Or to generate income through advertising?
Established news webpages will have some advertising. It really comes down to the proportion of advertising versus news stories.
The example below is fake news for a number of reasons, but look at the prominence and the amount of advertising on this site.
Look for elements that you would expect from an established news source. Such elements are:
Photos play a large part in evoking an emotion when reading a story. Photos can play into our implicit and confirmation biases. It is easy to save photos off the internet and use them in non-related fake news stories.
Photos can also be photoshopped. We've all seen incredible photos online. When you see something fantastic or unbelieveable, consult your factchecking sites to see if the image has already been debunked.
You can use google image search to help determine the original source of the image. This is especially useful when you see photos that are too good to be true or seem suspect. On the right you see the original photo of President Obama. On the left, you see the photo has been switched and someone photoshopped a picture of a cigarette in his mouth. The doctored photo was shared widely in an attempt to paint President Obama as a liar who had publicly stated that he quit smoking.
To create a website, not on a blogging platform such as blogger, you have to register your website. You can run the URL of a webpage through who.is or whois.icann.org to see when and who set up the website.
If a website was just recently established, that can be a red flag.
If the website is registered in another country, but posts predominately on stories outside of that country, that can be a red flag.
If the website is registered to an individual, but the website seems to be representing a corporation, that can be a red flag.
People or bots who make fake news create headlines that spark a strong emotional response. Headlines in all CAPS or headlines that are sensational are likely to get shared more frequently. Most fake news stories are shared based on the headline alone and the stories aren't necessarily read. Go past the headline and critically read the story.
For example, this fake news story has an incredibly sensational headline. However, when you read the story you discover that the authors make claims without any supportive documentation, use sensational language throughout the story, don't share their methodology for data collection, editorialize and make suggestive comments within the story. And the same story, word for word, is shared among many other fake news sites.
Before sharing that scintillating quote, copy and paste it into a search engine to verify if it is real or not.
What is bias?
Factual Reporting vs. News Analysis
"Evaluating news sources is one of the more contentious issues out there. People have their favorite news sources and don't like to be told that their news source is untrustworthy.
For fact-checking, it's helpful to draw a distinction between two activities:
Most newspaper articles are not lists of facts, which means that outfits like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times do both news gathering and news analysis in stories. What has been lost in the dismissal of the New York Times as liberal and the Wall Street Journal as conservative is that these are primarily biases of the news analysis portion of what they do. To the extent the bias exists, it's in what they choose to cover, to whom they choose to talk, and what they imply in the way they arrange those facts they collect. The news gathering piece is affected by this, but in many ways largely separate, and the reputation for fact checking is largely separate as well." [italics and emphasis added]
Quoted from Michael A. Caulfield's Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers. 26: Evaluating News Sources.
Social media and web search engine algorithms are deliberately opaque. Algorithms often reinforce our existing biases. Unlike media stories, how these online tools distribute fake news is not open to scrutiny. In this opinion article from the New York Times, "How to Monitor Fake News," Tom Wheeler suggests a way to open up social media algorithms to public scrutiny without compromising individual privacy.
This video from the Southern Poverty Law Center shows how the Google searching algorithm effectively narrowed the perspective of Dylann Roof because he searched for white supremacy information. In this example, other points of view were not represented because the Google search results privileged hate sites.
(Source: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017)
On Dec. 5, 2019 researchers from the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence released a study demonstrating how easy it is to purchase artificial engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The research was an attempt to test these companies’ effectiveness at stopping paid influence campaigns designed to game their algorithms and deceive their users about the popularity of posts.
(Source: ABC News, 2021)
