How to decide if a news story is fake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Dunning has an excellent article at Skeptoid on November 22, 2022 titled How to Spot Fake News. His headings are:

 

Make sure the news also appears on reliable news sources

Check your biases

Check the article’s biases

Watch for conspiratorial overtones

Double check for satire

Check the date

Don’t trust the headline

Don’t trust pictures

A quick Google trick…

Consider the source

 

There is an article by Jordan Liles at Snopes (Fact Check) on November 17, 2022 titled Did Disney file a patent for roller coaster that jumps tracks? He notes the original source is a satire site, The Mouse Trap. I suspect the picture was edited using the clone-stamp tool in Photoshop to remove the tracks - which have a plain blue sky for background.  

 

There is another long article by David Gorski at Respectful Insolence on November 23, 2022 titled “Died Suddenly”: Resurrecting the old antivax lie of depopulation. He debunks the ‘evidence’ and conspiracies in that pseudo-documentary from Stew Peters. There is a fact-checking article by Bill McCarthy at Poynter on April 22, 2022 on an earlier ‘documentary’ titled Radio Host Stew Peters’ “Watch the Water’ film ridiculously claims COVID-19 is snake venom. Another article by Jonathan Jarry at the McGill Office for Science and Society on November 25, 2022 is titled The anti-vaccine documentary Died Suddenly wants you to feel, not think.  

 

On August 7, 2017 I blogged about Spotting fake news and finding reliable information for speeches.

 

An image of a man reading a newspaper was adapted from Openclipart.