Our days are a time of information flow and universal openness. There are so many content, links and various information guides that it is often difficult to distinguish information stuffing and provocation from real news. How to protect yourself from spreading and consuming false information? There are several ways.
Any information always has a starting point. The place, person, or company that started it all. A foreign or domestic news agency, a live TV channel, an independent correspondent from the scene – they are all the first to report what is happening. The regional newspaper website unknown to anyone, the grandmother at the entrance and the brother of your colleague's neighbor from the accounting department are not the primary sources.
Noisy, resonant, scandalous and mass events always have a media trail: every modern person over the age of 16 has at least 1 phone with a photo camera in his pocket. Facebook Instagram*, Facebook*, and YouTube are uploading hundreds of thousands of new photos and videos per minute. If everyone is writing about some kind of emergency, but there is not a single photo and video from there during the first 90 minutes after the "news" – the news is most likely fake.
Russian-language media are very often "bought" by "ducks" from Twitter and from English-language fake news sites like OnionNews. Fact-checking in local and regional media often limps on both legs. A search of foreign influential publications in 3 minutes will give you an idea of whether something extraordinary is happening or the invasion of the Martians is just the fruit of a successful information hoax.
If the "sensation" is brought to the Network by the conditional newspaper "News of Khakassia", whose website opened a month ago, it is suspicious. Also, do not rush to quote various "news agencies" about which no one had heard before the sensational news appeared. Do not perceive social networks as the only fair source of news by clicking on links that lead to unknown web resources.
There is probably at least one live video broadcast from the scene of disasters, demonstrations, celebrations, festivals or a police chase. It can be conducted by activists and bloggers, professional journalists or just amateurs. Try to find such a video broadcast.
The most high-profile events can be tracked by trends on Twitter and Facebook* using hashtags. There you can also see who generates the main stream of tweets and links with the tags you are interested in: bots or real users and serious news agencies.
Russian TV showed information about the Chelyabinsk meteorite an hour after its fall, when the entire YouTube was already flooded with videos from the scene from a dozen different locations. The other day RIA Novosti turned into "Russia Today", and the First Channel for a year shows instead of news a chronicle of the life of one person with a major position. Try not to bet on the perception of reality through a television screen, even if by some misunderstanding you still have a cable TV package in your house.
If you are associated with working in a content project, a small online media or an information blog, do not forget about the power of endurance. No matter how tempting it is to be the first to put a "sensation" in the tape, double–check the facts, follow the previous 7 items from the list - and then wait a few minutes anyway. Even if everyone around repeats that "this is true and confirmed information," an official denial may sound at the last moment. And it's always better to be the first to publish a refutation than the last to pick up a fake.
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