Websites created to mimic mainstream news sites:
Look for contact information with a verifiable address and affiliation.
Look for an About page, often in the header or footer of the home page. Read the About page closely for evidence of partisanship or bias. If there's no About page and no Contact page, be very skeptical.
In staff listings (or on the About page), look critically at the list of executives. Are they real people or stock photos? Open a new tab and look for another profile of the individual (e.g. LinkedIn).
Perform an independent search for the news source. Compare and verify URLs.
Example: http://abcnews.com.co/ (fake site) is not the ABC Network News http://abcnews.go.com, but the logo and the URL are almost identical.
Advertisements designed to look like news stories:
Look for labels: a corporate logo. Or a tiny statement indicating Paid Post, Advertisement, or Sponsored by. Or the tiny Ad Choices triangle at the upper right corner of an image.
Pause and give yourself time to reflect on sources that play on your emotions. Helpful advice about sharing online news stories from Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael Arthur Caulfield:
"When you feel strong emotion — happiness, anger, pride, vindication — and that emotion pushes you to share a "fact" with others, STOP. Above all, it’s these things that you must fact-check.
Why? Because you’re already likely to check things you know are important to get right, and you’re predisposed to analyze things that put you an intellectual frame of mind. But things that make you angry or overjoyed, well… our record as humans are not good with these things."
Book Excerpt: Build a Fact-Checking Habit by Checking Your Emotions
AFP Malaysia is the fact checker for Malaysia.
Full Fact is the UK’s independent factchecking charity.
A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center
Focuses exclusively on false and misleading scientific claims that are made by partisans to influence public policy.
Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check site.
Award-winning fact-checking site.
Provides multiple angles on the same story.
From the nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the Center for Responsive Politics, the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
A browser plugin that lets you know if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.
Uses an algorithm to analyse photographs. Provides metadata that can help detect if an image has been manipulated.