Fake News Is Everywhere — And It’s Dangerous.
Here’s How to Know It When You See It
CREDO Mobile

Fake news is everywhere—and it’s dangerous. Here’s how to know it when you see it

(February 19, 2025) — In the good old days, fake news was funny. “I married Bigfoot.” “Computer virus spreads to humans!” We saw stuff like that at the supermarket checkout counter and we laughed.

Now, fake news is everywhere — and it’s no joke. Sometimes it’s dangerous. As it was in 2016, when a North Carolina man drove to a Washington, DC, pizzeria with an assault rifle to “investigate” the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed (falsely) that Hillary Clinton’s inner circle was running a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant.

Since then, it’s gotten a lot worse. Misinformation dominates the national conversation. It’s online, on the radio, on TV. It’s all over social media. Often, it’s not obviously fake. It’s believable, it’s shareable — and it has the power to cause not only societal damage but individual harm.

Fake News Warps Your Brain (Yes, Really)
Truth is a virtue, fake news is a virus — and it spreads just as fast. A few years ago, researchers measured the speed and scope with which fake news propagates on social media. They followed over 125,000 “rumor cascades” on Twitter and found that fake news reached far more people than the truth, with the top 1% of rumors spreading to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, while the truth rarely reached more than 1,000 people. Rumors also spread much faster than the truth, driven by the emotions (usually anger) they’re designed to provoke.

Mainstream media outlets have fact-checking procedures to guard against fake news (for now, anyway). Social media platforms have no such protections. Elon Musk dismantled X’s content-moderation system several years ago. At the start of 2025, Mark Zuckerberg followed suit, killing the content moderation at Meta and replacing it with a “community” system similar to X’s.

So, it’s mostly up to you to check the veracity of the “news” you read or hear or watch on the Internet. Do you really need to? For your mental health, yes. Research shows that even a few minutes of exposure to fake news can subconsciously rewire your brain. Without you even realizing it, fake news will provoke an emotional reaction, implant false memories and reinforce existing biases. It will stick in your brain and continue to affect your thinking, whether you like it or not.

Let’s say you read a false and defamatory story about a political candidate. Research shows that, even though you know the story is false, the information will linger in the back of your mind and trigger a negative emotion anytime you hear about the candidate in the future.

Take These Steps to Spot Fake News
Mike Caulfield is a digital literacy expert who focuses on fake news and how to detect it. He’s the author of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online and he’s the creator of the SIFT method for evaluating online content.

These are the four steps of SIFT. They’re easy and they’re well worth applying as you make your way around the Internet.

• Stop. When you come across a piece of content, read the headline, then pause and take note of your emotional response. Headlines are written to grab your attention (they’re clickbait) and they do it most effectively by triggering an emotional reaction. Before you read, watch or share the content, think what you already know about the topic.
• Investigate the source. Google the publisher of the content and see what the Internet says about it. Is there a lot of information on the publisher or very little? Also question the publisher’s motivation. Does it have a vested interest or financial motivation? Remember those conservative influencers who last year were being paid millions to spread false information that promoted Kremlin interests.
• Find better coverage. Check any content published by an unestablished platform against an outlet you know and trust. If a claim is controversial, odds are it’s been looked into already by online fact-checkers. Many of them are nonprofit, nonpartisan websites. Good ones includeFactCheck.org, Snopes.com and PolitiFact. There’s also Google Fact Check, which searches only fact-checking sites. If you want to check the trustworthiness of an image, you can run a reverse image search at sites like TinEyeand Yandex.
• Trace claims to their original context. If you see a claim that’s controversial or surprising, try to find out where it originated. Your goal is discover if the claim was taken out of context to create an emotional response and grab attention. Images, for example, can have many different meanings depending on their context. The same goes for quotes.

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