Lesson 1 of 4
How to Spot Fake News
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4 lessons · Beginner
Early-stage product — exploratory, no guaranteed results.
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, 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 once you sign in — 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?
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