How to Avoid Falling for Disinformation During the Election

(TNS) — False and misleading information is everywhere these days, and it's becoming harder to know who is trustworthy as the way we get news continues to evolve online. Bad actors ramp up their attempts to mislead readers during election season, when people are naturally looking to learn about ballot issues and candidates' positions — so this is a time for extra vigilance on the part of news consumers.

Facebook in particular has fueled the spread of disinformation, studies have found, and the company has faced sharp criticism for its failure to combat it. But the dominant social media platform isn't the only vector for misleading or flatly untrue information, so here are some reliable ways to separate fact from fiction. Read on and share these tips to make your own feed a source of truth.

And register for our free event, "Fact or Fiction: How to Spot Election Disinformation," Oct. 29 at 12:30 p.m., hosted by The Star's Melinda Henneberger with Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, former U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander and other guests.

Get independent verification

Don't automatically take elected officials' and candidates' word for it. Verify claims, especially if they run counter to common wisdom. Here are some resources that check out information, providing research and citations as backup:

— The Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org uses principles of journalism and scholarship to verify or rebut what politicians say.

— The Poynter Institute's PolitiFact runs its "Truth-O-Meter" on claims to give you a quick guide to how trustworthy a sound bite is.

— The nonpartisan News Literacy Project offers resources to help you become a more savvy news consumer. Sign up for its newsletters, and check out "Practice good information hygiene: Sanitize before you share" for tips on how not to spread disinformation in your own social media accounts.

— Poynter's fact-checking newsletter Factually helps you keep up with the latest good and bad info. Sign up here.

— The News Literacy Project's "Is That a Fact?" podcast looks at how democracy can survive in a media environment full of intentional deception, and offers ways you can help fix it. Download the episodes here.

— For more than 25 years, Snopes has been investigating dubious claims, growing from its initial focus on cataloging urban legends to become one of the most-cited fact-checking sites on the internet. Its well-documented entries rate the veracity of a wide variety of allegations and warn about scams targeting consumers. You can submit your own questions for its staff to evaluate.

Root out false information on social networks

— Facebook has a " False News" feature to flag links with unreliable or phony information. Here is how to use it.

— Twitter offers a variety of ways to report false information, threats and other violations of its terms of service. It has become more proactive in recent months by labeling tweets by prominent users as unreliable, and sometimes even removing them altogether.

— Third-party services such as Bot Sentinel and Botometer analyze the activity of Twitter accounts to identify probable fake or deceptive ones intended to manipulate the conversation artificially.

— Do a little Google sleuthing to verify posters' identities. If someone is tweeting information that nobody else is sharing, see if that user has a profile elsewhere. If he or she is alone in making a surprising claim, be skeptical.

Always check the source

Remember, professional journalists with established news outlets base their reputations on the reliability of what they report. The news business is highly competitive, so legitimate sources have a huge incentive to get things right. If multiple newsrooms are reporting the same story in a similar way, it's likely to be based in reality.

A single social media account, especially one whose sources are not disclosed, deserves much more scrutiny when it is sharing a story not corroborated by others.

If you're unfamiliar with a website touting news you haven't seen reported elsewhere, look more closely. Reputable news sources identify the journalists reporting stories, and often give readers biographical information and ways to read their other work. When an opinion piece comes from a newspaper's editorial board, legitimate operations identify the members of that board.

The disinfo game has gone local in recent years. Harvard's Nieman Lab has identified more 400 sites pushing hyperpartisan, highly unreliable local stories, particularly in swing states. Check your area with their interactive locator map.

NewsGuard, from a team of respected journalists, gives trust ratings for news websites based on human evaluation, not algorithms. It offers a free browser plugin that lets you check out sites instantly.

The Freedom Forum Institute's Quick Guide to Spotting Fake News has plenty of tips. For example, unreliable sites will sometimes use tricky URLs meant to mimic established, trustworthy sources. And if a source has an amateurish layout, obvious typographical errors or sloppy writing, you're right to be cautious.

Misleading information is nothing new, but the internet has enabled its spread like never before. Luckily, today's technological tools can also help you become savvier in how you find your news.

(c)2020 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.