To help our critical thinking, there are some tools and sources of information to detect fake news that can be very useful

The most important tool for detecting disinformation is none other than our critical thinking. Given the avalanche of information that arrives to us daily, we should always act with caution and be aware that false information spreads much more easily than true information and, after all, the damage is much more difficult to repair. Therefore, staying alert and not believing everything that comes to us, especially if it sounds too spectacular, scandalous or emotional, is the first step to follow.

To train your eye and improve your ability to detect lies, in Learn to Check we have developed the PANTERA method, an acronym that will give you the keys to know what you have to look at and what are the signs that should wake your alarms in the face of suspicious information. Learn to hunt disinformation as a true predator!

However, to help our critical thinking, there are some tools and sources of information to detect fake news that can be very useful:

An initial step that can be easy and fast to start verifying if an information is false would be to look for it on Google or on our favorite search platform. The results will help us to know who and where they are talking about the issue (if someone is talking about it). This may give us an initial impression on the reliability of the information. It’s not the same as we find it published by an anonymous user in a car forum as on the British encyclopedia website, is it? In fact, in the case of Google, if the search engine detects that you are looking for news that has been verified by a data verification website, it will offer you these links as a prominent result. Consulting websites such as Wikipedia can also be useful as a first step in your research on the reliability of information. But be careful! Open edition search engines or encyclopedias are not infallible and we cannot consider that their answers are always correct. The ideal would be to use them as an initial step to give us a first idea. To verify more reliably, Read on!

There are organizations made up of information professionals who are exclusively dedicated to verifying the information for you. Not only that, but they explain to you step by step and with a lot of transparency how they have concluded and what tools they have used to consider if an information is false, true or without sufficient data to be able to conclude anything. Although there are others, some of the most relevant and most prestigious verifiers in Spanish are Maldita, Newtral, EFE Verifica, VerificaRTVE, Verificat, Infoveritas or AFP Factual.

Even easier. Google has designed a search engine dedicated exclusively to fables. In it appear the latest news published on the verification websites. So, if there is any information that we want to verify, all we have to do is put the keywords in the search bar and give them back. In a few seconds the results will appear and we will be able to check if this information has been verified or not, which verifier has worked on it and you can access the link of its denial or piece about that content. You can choose in which language you want to search for the information and also offers the option to upload a photograph or image and look for fact-checks or denials associated with that photo.

Welcome to the general internet archive. This website belongs to the Internet Archivi, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of digital files, contains everything (or almost everything) that has been published on the Internet since 1996. This giant digital newspaper library allows us to search for deleted content, determine the veracity of screenshots, detect if there have been changes without warning in sensitive content such as an electoral program or other type of information. In addition, if you are curious, you can also see how the design of the websites has changed over time. How does it work? It is very simple: you have to put the link you want to examine in the upper box, where it says “enter the URL” and you will see a timeline of all the years in which they have archived this content. You have to select year, month, day and time and there you can see what this website was like then and continue with your inquiries to determine the veracity of an information. Web pages and publications on social networks can be modified or deleted, so visiting Wayback Machine and consulting the original content can help us detect false content. In addition, it is also very useful for recovering content from broken links: we can go to the date when that content was available and retrieve it there.