(1 Aug 2025) Even researchers and students perform poorly at spotting “fake news” and misleading content online, as a trial in 2017 by Stanford University professor Sam Wineburg showed. Happily, Wineburg found that there is a group who do better – and that is people from my former line of work: professional fact-checkers. The trick is the approach they take and the questions they ask.
What works better is to ask not whether a claim seems plausible or has been heard before, but these four questions:
1. What do you know about where the claim came from?
2. What do other, credible sources say?
3. Check your biases – what might make you likely to fall for the claim?
4. What do you know about the context?
Read the article in full here.
