thirqual:

misanthropymademe:

reasonandempathy:

fiction-is-not-reality:

phosphorescent-naidheachd:

sanguinarysanguinity:

perfidiousalbion:

king-of-gilboa:

perfidiousalbion:

sarah531:

funereal-disease:

pervocracy:

twentyonelizards:

1. if there’s not a source, find a source. if you can’t find one, ask the person. if they can’t find one, don’t believe it.

2. if there is a source, click it. people sincerely reblogging those ‘shocking’ posts where the source leads to a rickroll or something, and they don’t know because they never clicked it: this one is for you

3. if you’ve clicked the source, look at what it is. is it the onion? Is it the daily mash? look at the other articles on the site and look for the ‘about’. please don’t be one of those people who takes the onion seriously.

4. if you’ve clicked the source and it’s not satire, how reputable is it? bbc news is a lot more reputable than supermystichoroscopesforonly99p.com. who is saying it matters. this can be hard if you don’t know much about the site, but a bit of research can help. wikipedia is a dodgy one because whilst anyone can edit it, lots of articles are under strict surveillance and will quickly get edited back. if you see a claim on wikipedia that looks strange, refer back to point one. wikipedia sources/ cites too.

5. anecdotes are not evidence! someone going ‘one time my dog ate a can of woofers dog food and died two days later’ doesn’t suggest woofers kills dogs. the plural of anecdotes is not data. sure, when 100 people are all going ‘hey, this thing makes XYZ awful things happen?’, listen, but don’t take one person’s experiences as gospel

6. ‘idk, some news article’ is not a source. ‘I saw it in some random interview a few weeks ago’ is not a source. ‘I can’t remember’ is definitely not a source. 

7. if something seems too good, bad or weird to be true, maybe it is! a two minute google search may help! 

8. basically ignore the daily mail bye

9. if it’s something that would make major international news if true but you can only find one source talking about it, it’s not true

10. Check the date. Don’t be the one to freak out over a five-year-old hurricane warning. 

11. If you see anyone laughing at/disregarding/demonising people who reblog to ask for a source, don’t trust that person.

12. Read the whole article! So many times a headline is completely misleading, and created only for clickbait. See that recent “Clinton doesn’t believe in free college” headline. She actually said she doesn’t believe the state should pay for free college for the wealthy. 

13. Screenshots of tweets and Facebook posts aren’t sources, they’re unverifiable and usually unashamedly biased towards the writers views and agendas.

Especially when the person making the Tumblr post is also the person who all the tweets belong to. It’s amazing how many times I’ve seen “Look at the storm X is causing on Twitter!” and it’s literally the same username as the blogger…

14. If you’re curious about a claim on wikipedia, you can also always click through to the ‘Talk’ page – very commonly there’s a debate there documenting the history of the claim, objections, and counter-objections: that discussion gives you a LOT more info to base your judgement on. Sometimes there’s even a formal dispute process back there, which again, gives you some context for the claim in the article itself.

The article’s edit history can also be enlightening. That takes more effort to search through, but if nothing else, you can check to see if a claim was added two minutes or two months ago, and how actively the page is being monitored/edited. If the edit history is a ghost-town, there haven’t been a lot of critical eyes on the article, and you should proceed cautiously. Flipside, a lot of activity doesn’t necessarily mean the article is sound, but it DOES mean there’s been more opportunity for problems to have been caught and fixed, and more opportunity for substantive discussion to have appeared on the Talk page (should discussion be warranted).

Corollaries to #3:
     3a. Absolutely check out the source’s “About” and other articles, but also do a quick internet search to learn about their credibility or lack thereof. For instance, while it’s pretty immediately obvious that The Sun isn’t a credible source, the layout of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror may make them appear vaguely credible to someone who isn’t aware that they’re both sensationalist tabloids (albeit with the former considerably more sensationalist than the latter).
     3b. Here is a list of known fake news sites for your perusal. Familiarize yourselves with the names/URLs for future reference. Similarly, here is a list of potentially unreliable sources on Wikipedia (which is somewhat ironic, seeing as Wikipedia itself isn’t the most reliable of sources).

Corollaries to #11:
     11a. OP may have already been sealioned to the point that their natural assumption is that you’re doing the same thing.
     11b. The post’s claims may be something that it’s very easy to find a source for with a quick internet search and—especially if the post is popular and gets a lot of notes (and thus a lot of people individually asking for the source)—they may be irritated that you couldn’t take the initiative to do so yourself. This is especially true if they’ve already answered this question on their blog… so check the OP’s blog before you ask, please!
     All of this goes double for people who are posting something about a form of marginalization that they personally face, as it may feel to them that you’re asking them to do additional free labor to educate you. Being snarky in return isn’t the most high-minded thing to do, but we’re all only human.
     That said: Always, always be careful about who you trust online. (And offline!) Someone who is an asshole to someone who asks them for a source may or may not be trustworthy… but either way, it’s up to you whether that’s someone you want to spend much time around.

Corollary to #13:
    13a. Screenshots from any form of media aren’t credible sources. They’re very easily falsified. This is how we can get screenshots that show a user making posts that they never actually made (someone cut and pasted the user’s icon and username over the actual OP’s) and this is how we can get screenshots that aren’t of the complete post, thus totally altering the content’s message. Try doing a reverse image search on TinEye and filter the results by Oldest. If that doesn’t yield any results, ask OP for a link. 
    13b. Sometimes posts are deleted and screenshots are all that are left. If OP provides you with a link that is invalid, try entering it into the WayBack Machine and see if you have any luck there. If not, don’t discount the screenshot altogether… but don’t count it as evidence in and of itself.

15. Check the notes on the post. OP or other users may have added additional relevant information… or debunked the post’s original claims altogether. 

16. Reverse image search (Google, TinEye, etc.) is your friend. Really. That’s how you can learn, say, that that photo of a destroyed city isn’t actually of the city that the post purports it to be at all… and that the photo is also five years old.

17. Snopes is your friend.

18. Learn to use basic search engine modifiers. (The technical terms used may sound intimidating at first, but I promise that the actual process of using these techniques is pretty simple.) This will allow you to pinpoint the information you’re looking for much more efficiently, saving you the time and energy to fact-check other claims you run into! 😉

19. If a source is a scientific research or anything of the likes, check its impact factor. Find the journal the study was published in, and Google “nameofthejournal impact factor”

Google will already give that to you, but it’s even more useful if you look for the impact factor on researchgate. There you will find a graph of how the journal has been doing in the last few years.

An unknown journal with low impact factor but that is steadily rising? Might be something worth checking out, but I’d suggest you to look for references of that article on bigger journals to attest the credit.

A very well known journal with an impact factor looking like a fall into the earth’s core? Seems like they lost credibility, don’t trust them.

Overall, with proper exceptions that need to be analysed if you have the tools for it (for example carefully reading the study and checking if their research is scientifically valid), the rule is: if the journal is big it’s likely legit, if the journal is small check for references in bigger journals; if there are no references in bigger journals the study isn’t worth noticing (yet or never).

It may look unjust because it penalizes smaller journals that might be doing a great job, but in the age of fake news this is how the scientific community protects itself. Even if you’re small, if you’re legit your study will be crossreferenced and repeated by bigger journals, and you’ll get your credit (which will raise your impact factor, which will make your journal more legit etc).

Do keep in mind, Journals and Articles have independent research/impact factors.  Check both of them.

Also this is handy if you want to read journal articles that are paywalled: https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link/

Impact factor of the journal is a terrible criterion for how respectable the results of a study are.

First, top journals have very different impact factors depending on the field.

Two, high impact factor journals have higher retraction rates. In particular, Nature and Science editors publish articles with controversial or shaky but ‘sexy’ results to drive discussion.