How to avoid getting conned by fake news sites; CNet, 11/19/16

Laura Hautala, CNet; How to avoid getting conned by fake news sites:

"How to flag fake news sites

The best tool at your disposal, of course, is common sense. No matter what your political bent, if a story serves only to reinforce your beliefs, it's best to be extra skeptical before sharing it.

If a report is purportedly based on other news stories, find the original source of the information. You might find some of the quotes are correct, but the rest may have been taken out of context or fabricated.

If the potentially false story you're reading doesn't link to an original source, well, that's a bad sign. Use a search engine to look for the keywords in the story to see if that "news" is being reported by any other outlets."

Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in.; Washington Post, 8/19/16

Brooke Binkowski, Washington Post; Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in. :

"...[T]his work is a social good. In addition to the hate mail, we receive a lot of frightened mail, from people who aren’t certain about their place in an increasingly scary world, where danger seemingly lurks around every corner. Times are changing, yes, but some websites take advantage of that uncertainty by plucking stories from the news and fluffing them up to make it appear as though there’s going to be a major disaster any minute now. (Recent examples included activity on a major fault line that supposedly signified an imminent massive earthquake on the West Coast, and the closure of cargo routes in the North Atlantic. Neither of these stories were true.) Concerned people pass along the stories, “just in case,” and spread the anxiety further. The people who own clickbait sites are never held accountable for dealing in fear. They do, however, make quite a lot of money from advertising.

We don’t think that our work will affect people committed to their belief systems to the exclusion of all facts. But Snopes can be a place where people begin their own research; we can be a reference for people who care to excavate the facts behind the often-terrifying headlines. We don’t pretend to be, nor do we want to be, the final word on any subject. We would like to be a starting point, though. In cases where clickability and virality trump fact, we feel that knowledge is the best antidote to fear."