How to Spot Fake News
Covers Why Smart People Share Fake Things, Lateral Reading: Leave the Page to Check the Page, Follow the Claim Home: Sources, Captions, and Generated Media and more.
“How to Spot Fake News” is a 4-lesson course 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. Try the first lesson without an account — or make your own course 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.
- Lateral Reading: Leave the Page to Check the Page. Most people check an unfamiliar source by reading it harder.
- Follow the Claim Home: Sources, Captions, and Generated Media. Most false claims are not invented. They are degraded.
- 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.
Lesson 1: 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 is what moves a thumb toward the share button before any checking happens.
That spike is useful, because it is data. When a post makes you feel furious or delightedly vindicated, treat the feeling itself as the cue to stop for thirty seconds. Nobody is exempt from this, including whoever writes courses like this one. Reactions are simply faster than judgement, in everyone.
Then there is the separate question of why it reached you at all. Most feeds are ranked by a recommender system that promotes whatever people engage with, and the most engaging thing humans produce is something that provokes. A claim that makes people angry travels further than a dull accurate one, with nobody along the way deciding to deceive anyone. It is a property of the machinery.
So the first practical rule of the course: prominence is not evidence. Seeing something everywhere tells you it performed well, not that it is true. Popularity and accuracy are measured by completely different instruments, and only one of them is running in your feed.
One thing stated plainly up front. This course teaches a method for checking claims, never a verdict on them. It will not give you a list of outlets to trust, will not tell you who is right about anything contested, and will spend its final lesson asking you to run the method on claims you were pleased to see. Everything after this is technique, and misinformation travels through all of us the same way.
Questions this course answers
What does a spike of fury, vindication or alarm indicate about a post?
Something built to spread is built to produce a spike of fury, vindication or alarm first, and that spike is what moves a thumb toward the share button before any checking happens.
How do most people check an unfamiliar source?
Most people check an unfamiliar source by reading it harder, staying on the page and judging it by how it looks.
What is the most common fake image by far?
The most common fake by far is genuine footage carrying a false caption.
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Early-stage product — exploratory, no guaranteed results.