Tips for spotting misinformation:

• Your first reaction to any news material should be: “Is this real?”
• Ask yourself: Are you completely sure you know who created or sent it? What might have been the source’s motivation for sharing the information?
• Take a minute to examine hyperbolic or emotional language, exclamation marks, extreme claims, expressions of fear, horror, or paranoia, anything that claims to be an eyewitness account, and calls to action such as “share this widely!”
• Double check voting information like polling place details to be sure bad actors aren’t able to mislead people and influence turnout.
• Look carefully at images and video, especially for distortions, mismatched shadows or perspectives, airbrush effects near edges, different degrees of pixelation in different parts of the image, or differences in color or tone across the image.

Photo tools:

• Reverse image search can help you identify the source of a photo, see how the image might differ from other versions on other sites, or spot differences in what sources are claiming about a photo. Directions from PBS are here, and this Forbes article includes steps to use reverse image search on your phone.
• A metadata viewer gives you information embedded in a photo file. This information varies, but it can include the time and date the photo was taken or last edited, coordinates where the photo was taken, the original file name, and/or the type of device used to take the photo. One metadata viewer is ExifInfo, which includes directions.

How to address false beliefs:

• Try “pre-bunking,” or giving your audience information in advance about strategies that might be used to manipulate their thinking. This fits especially well into reporting on false claims, whether they’re made by politicians, pundits, or social media accounts.
• When correcting misinformation, mentioning the falsehood that you’re correcting very rarely encourages belief of that falsehood, research suggests. The ordering of the truth and the falsehood you’re correcting doesn’t matter much, but proximity does matter. The best practice is to include the correction in the same sentence or immediately adjacent to the falsehood.
• Your coverage may need to quote false claims from politicians and others, but your reporting doesn’t have to legitimize those claims. When you hear a falsehood repeated often, make sure to have the right data on hand during interviews so you can bring it up.
• For falsehoods that come up regularly, try crafting boilerplate language noting the inaccuracy and the truth so that you can insert it into stories as necessary.