False and misleading claims travel faster and further than ever, often dressed up to look like real news. The good news is that spotting them is a skill, not a talent, and a handful of habits used by professional fact-checkers can sharply improve your odds. Here is how to evaluate what you see online before you believe it or share it.

What misinformation is

Misinformation is false or misleading information that spreads regardless of whether the person sharing it means to deceive. A closely related term, disinformation, refers to falsehoods spread deliberately. For a reader trying to protect themselves, the distinction matters less than the response: in both cases the goal is to verify before trusting. The techniques below work on both.

Read laterally, not just down the page

The single most useful habit, identified by researchers who study how fact-checkers work, is lateral reading.

Most people evaluate a website by reading down the page itself: Does it look professional? Does it cite sources? Does it sound confident? The problem is that anyone can build a slick site and sound authoritative. Fact-checkers do the opposite. They leave the page almost immediately and open new tabs to ask, what do other, independent sources say about this site or this claim?

In practice, lateral reading means:

  • Searching the name of the website or author to see how others describe them.
  • Looking for the same claim on established news organisations or dedicated fact-checking sites.
  • Checking a reference work or encyclopaedia for background.

If a striking claim appears on only one obscure site and nowhere reputable, that absence is itself a signal.

Check the source behind the claim

Before accepting information, ask three questions about its origin.

  1. Who is behind it? Look for a real organisation or named author with a track record. Anonymous accounts and vague outlets warrant caution.
  2. What is their expertise or stake? A claim about medicine from a medical body carries more weight than the same claim from an unknown blog. Consider whether the source has an agenda or something to sell.
  3. Is it corroborated? Reliable news is usually reported by multiple independent outlets. A story that exists in only one place, especially a partisan or fringe one, has not been confirmed.

A confident headline is not evidence. The question is never how sure the source sounds, but how well the claim holds up when you look elsewhere.

Master the basics of images and video

Images are among the most common vehicles for misinformation, often because they are genuine photos used in a false context, an old photo presented as recent, or an image from one country passed off as another.

The simplest defence is a reverse image search, which lets you find other places an image has appeared online. This frequently reveals the photo's true origin and date. Watch also for:

  • Captions that make a strong claim the image cannot actually prove.
  • Images that are cropped to remove context.
  • Video that has been clipped to change its meaning, or slowed down or sped up.

You do not need forensic tools for most cases. Simply asking where did this image really come from? catches a large share of misuse.

Recognise emotional manipulation

Much misinformation is engineered to bypass careful thought by triggering strong feelings. Content designed to make you furious, frightened or triumphant spreads faster, and online systems tend to amplify whatever gets the most reaction. Pew Research Center surveys have repeatedly found that emotionally charged and divisive content circulates widely.

Treat a powerful emotional reaction as a prompt to slow down, not speed up. Warning signs include:

  • Headlines in all capitals or stuffed with exclamation marks.
  • Language that casts every issue as us versus them.
  • Claims that seem designed mainly to make you angry at a group of people.
  • Urgent demands to share immediately, before you have time to check.

The feeling itself is the hook. Pausing to verify is how you avoid the trap.

Build the habit

No single check is foolproof, which is why these techniques work best together and as a routine. The Poynter Institute, which trains journalists and runs media-literacy programmes, emphasises building reflexes: a brief pause before sharing, a quick lateral-reading search, a glance at the source. Done consistently, these add only seconds and stop most falsehoods cold.

The bottom line

Spotting misinformation comes down to a few repeatable moves: read laterally by checking what other sources say, scrutinise who is behind a claim and whether others confirm it, use a reverse image search to test photos, and treat content engineered for outrage with extra caution. None of this requires special expertise, only the discipline to verify before you believe, and especially before you share.