Discerning Fact from Fiction on the Internet: An Everyday Person’s Guide to Fact-Checking

Be familiar with a few handy fact-checking websites.

My favorite is Snopes.com. They’ve been around forever, they cite their sources, they get to the bottom of things. They’re good at backtracing where rumors began too. They’re good not only for checking political rumors about our favorite candidate to hate or love, but also your latest Facebook copyright notice hoax or the story circulating in your neighborhood that Russian child traffickers are trying to kidnap local children. I like that broad base of fact-checking.

In recent days, it’s become popular to accuse Snopes of a liberal bias (like this writer does). But, even if you assume this to be the case, Snopes is still exceedingly useful. First of all, as stated above, all media people have biases. All people in general have biases. The important thing is to be aware of one’s bias. And even if we assume the folks at Snopes are not aware of their bias, their site is still useful because they cite their sources, and their sources often include primary rather than secondary sources. So, you can be skeptical of Snopes, but you can also easily backtrace through their sources to decide if you agree with their conclusion.

The other fact-checking website I would really recommend is Politifact. This Pulitizer Prize winning website fact checks the statements of political candidates and rates them on a scale. They seem to be willing to rule as false or partially false statements made by both political parties, which I appreciate.

Using your cursor, highlight the entire internet rumor you want to fact check.

Copy and paste it into Snopes.com. If that comes up with nothing, copy and paste it into Google. If the only sites that come up are partisan blogs (on either side), you are probably on shaky ground, truth-wise. If reputable news outlets (preferably print media) are covering the story as well, there might be some truth there. The very easiest internet rumors to check are quotations. Just plug the whole convenient quotation into a search engine and often a link will come up on the same page showing that that quotation is false. For example, the following:

Plug that sucker into Google and voila! She never said that. Now, it fits into what people think of Hillary Clinton, their perception of her. And she may have a view that the government should have more influence than some people are comfortable with, but she didn’t actually say this particular thing. To keep sharing it on Facebook is bearing false witness.
But what about my favorite candidate to disparage? Donald Trump says some crazy things that deserve repudiation, but the truth is important enough that we shouldn’t share false stories about him. How about this (both of these are memes I have seen pass through my Facebook timeline). This is the kind of meme I could fall for because this is what I think about Trump too:

My trusty Google friend, can you help me out? Yet again, we have a case of a meme having a politician say something that feeds into what people think of them already. Trump may very well believe this personally, but we have no way of knowing that. For all of his horrendous flaws, he didn’t actually say this. If someone tries to tell you Snopes has a liberal agenda, maybe show them that Snopes refuted this meme.