Early-stage product — exploratory, no guaranteed results.
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How to Spot Fake News
You'll know more than 71% on this topic
Lesson breakdown
Being smart or skeptical doesn’t protect you: manufactured claims bypass judgment by triggering a reaction first, and your own emotional spike is the signal to slow down. Also why your feed handed it to you (engagement ranking rewards outrage, so prominence is not evidence). Sets the neutrality contract: a method, never a verdict. The free first lesson.
The one technique that separates fact-checkers from everyone else, taught properly. Don’t judge a source by how it looks; leave it, open new tabs, and find out what the rest of the web says about it. Ends with the drill: three unfamiliar sources, one minute each.
Where it actually came from. Reversing the chain to the real paper, filing, or transcript (and reading its numbers honestly: margin of error, percentage points, base rates), what it means when no primary source exists, and why real footage with a false caption outnumbers deepfakes. For AI-generated media the durable test is provenance, not artifact-spotting: "count the fingers" advice ages badly. Closes on breaking news, where waiting is a verification technique.
The most valuable habit and the one everyone skips: the method is easy on claims you dislike and nearly impossible on claims you were pleased to see. "This confirms what I’ve been saying" is a stronger warning sign than "this is outrageous." Then the capstone routine, short enough to run before you share, plus correcting yourself cleanly and pushing back on a friend’s post without starting a fight.
About this study
“How to Spot Fake News” is a free, 4-lesson study on How to spot fake news: lateral reading, tracing a claim to its primary source, recognizing AI-generated images and text, and verifying anything before you share it at Beginner level, created with soclever, a personal AI teacher. Each lesson takes a few minutes and ends with a check-in question; finish the curriculum and you can take a certificate test to earn a diploma. Starting is free and needs no account — or generate your own study on any topic.
What you'll learn
Why Smart People Share Fake Things. Manufactured claims rarely beat your reasoning. They get in ahead of it. Something built to spread is built to produce a spike of fury, vindication or alarm first, and that spike…
Lateral Reading: Leave the Page to Check the Page. Most people check an unfamiliar source by reading it harder. They stay on the page and judge it by how it looks: clean design, a confident tone, an About page, a domain ending…
Follow the Claim Home: Sources, Captions, and Generated Media. Most false claims are not invented. They are degraded. A real finding loses a qualifier at every hop: study, press release, news write-up, aggregator headline, someone's post, a…
Checking the Things You Already Believe (and the 30-Second Habit). The method in the last two lessons is easy to run on a claim you dislike and genuinely hard to run on one you were glad to see. Agreement quietly closes the question. Doubt keeps…
Questions this study answers
Why does something appearing everywhere in your feed tell you nothing about whether it is accurate?
What does a fact-checker do in the first few seconds on an unfamiliar source, and why is judging that source by its design unreliable?
Why is asking where a file came from a more durable test for AI-generated media than hunting for visual flaws in the image itself?
Why is a claim you were pleased to see more likely to go unchecked than one that made you angry?
