I like showing people how to debunk viral photos for a couple reasons. First, it requires small enough action that it can easily become a habit. You don’t need to do a lot of research or have a lot of knowledge. Second, it shows how technological affordance (in this case Google Chrome’s right-click “Search by… Continue reading

This comes up in my feed today: I go to retweet it, but stop. How do I know this is true? It’s a little alarm bell that goes off now when something seems just a little too perfect. I right click on the image, search by image.   I look at the URLs, and I see… Continue reading

There is an excellent article in the Guardian by Evgeny Morozov, who gets at the heart of what we have come to call “the fake news problem”. According to Morozov, there are two “denials” that drive not only fake news (and a host of other corrosive clickbait), but our entire information environment: The big threat… Continue reading

My ideal news environment would be an international mix of both small and large papers and individual reporters doing paid work in ways that rewarded those with a dedication to facts and deep analysis over spin, clickbait, and press release stenography. We’d probably get part of the way there if we could figure out a… Continue reading

So nobody took me up on my trace a viral photo challenge. I’m disappointed in you all. It’s like you have jobs or something. In any case, I’ve walked through the solution to one of the images in a video. For what it’s worth I recorded the video without sound so that I could concentrate… Continue reading

This tweet appeared in my stream yesterday. I used the first photo here (guy with feet on fire) as an example in my evolving course materials on how to trace things to a source on the internet. I also tracked down the other photos as well. It took barely any time at all. Maybe ten… Continue reading

I’ve been working over the break to boil down how to check Internet claims into something short and active. Short, because longer prescriptions don’t work. Active, because we are trying to build habits. Here’s what I’ve got so far. See if someone has already done the work. Some people call this the “Check Snopes First”… Continue reading

Josh Marshall, who is generally one of the better political commentators out there, recently wrote a piece called Why You’re Fooling Yourself About Fake News. The point of the piece is that liberals who believe that fake news sways elections are wrong. Fake news, says Marshall, is a demand-driven phenomena: the people reading and believing… Continue reading

So yesterday I spent the day — and really, almost the entire day — fact-checking so-called “statements of fact” here, on this rather boring Rick Perry article. So, for example, the article says that Rick Perry did the Cha-Cha on Dancing with the Stars. We check that Perry actually got a “D” in a class… Continue reading

Another quick lesson in sourcing viral user-created content. Here’s a picture that showed up in my stream today. OK, so what’s the story here? To get more information, I pull the textual information off the image and throw it in a Google search: Which brings me to a YouTube video that tells me this was… Continue reading