Media literacy

Spotting fakes covers the psychology of why we fall for false claims. This page is the practical toolkit: the specific techniques professional fact-checkers actually use, adapted for anyone with five minutes and a second browser tab.

Lateral reading

Researchers at the Stanford History Education Group studied how professional fact-checkers evaluate unfamiliar sites and found their key habit: instead of reading up and down a single page trying to judge it from the inside, they immediately open new tabs and read laterally — searching what other, independent sources say about the site or claim before trusting it. It consistently outperformed the "read carefully and use your judgment" approach most people default to.

Check where else the image or quote has appeared

A reverse image search (searching the internet for other instances of a specific photo) will often reveal that a "breaking news" photo is actually old, from a different event entirely, or has been cropped to remove context. The same instinct applies to quotes: search the exact wording before assuming it's real.

Check the date

A huge share of viral misinformation isn't fabricated — it's just old, recirculated as if it just happened. An article, statistic or photo from years ago can look brand new stripped of its original context and timestamp.

Know your satire

Satirical outlets exist specifically to be absurd, and headlines from them regularly get shared as real news by people who missed the "satire" label. If a claim seems too outrageous to be true, checking whether the source is a known satire site is often the fastest way to resolve it.

Understand the feed you're reading

Much of what you see online is selected by algorithms optimized to keep you engaged, not to inform you accurately — a dynamic researchers have called the filter bubble. Combined with confirmation bias (our natural tendency to notice and accept information that matches what we already believe), it means the version of "what everyone's saying" in your feed can be a distorted sample of reality.

AI-generated media

Convincing AI-generated images, audio and video ("deepfakes") are increasingly hard to spot on sight alone. The same lateral-reading habit applies: rather than staring harder at a single image, check whether credible independent outlets are reporting the same thing, and treat a single unverified clip — however real it looks — with real caution. See AI hallucinations for the text-generation side of the same problem.

📋 None of this requires becoming a full-time skeptic. It's five habits, applied selectively to the claims that actually matter: read laterally, check the date, check the source, know your satire, and notice when a feed is just telling you what you want to hear.

Where the underlying claim is a specific misconception, our common misconceptions and science myths pages may already have it fact-checked.