How To Spot The Truth

Misinformation often has typos in it due to the haste in which it was typed in. For example in 2017 the website Viral Mugshot posted an article that said that Michael Jordan had died of a heart attack. Despite the fact that the article had apparent quotes from Jordan's wife and a Video from ESPN That showed a reporter saying goodbye. Even with all of this "Evidence" the thing that immediately gave away that this was fake news was the numerous spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that the article had. If an article is too long and you don't want to check all of it for spelling mistakes you can use a website like <a href="https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check">Grammarly</a>.

One of the sections from the article in question, note all of the errors.

Page 2: Index Page 3: Introduction Page 4: Spelling &amp; Punctuation Page 6: Discrepencies Page 8: External Search Page 10: Believability

This is a submission for #Unhackathon 2023. Since the focus of the project this year is "Key Indicators of Deception for Misinformation" the following pages will give some tips and details for spotting misinformation.

Misinformation is wrong information that is shared accidentally. Often the person sharing it believes it to be real and shares it quickly. No one piece of advice will always accurately reveal real vs fake, so be careful what you believe online. Disinformation is wrong information that is purposefully shared to further an agenda in some form, be it religious, political, social, or another form.

After reading something ask yourself, is it believable? Could you see what is being described actually happening? Follow the previous bit of information if you think it might be real and search it up, but if the information is too extreme to be real it's probably fake. For example, on the right you can see a video where reporters are debating whether or not the American government should stop throwing money into a hole. Now while that story might sound good for one second, you will soon realize how ridiculous that is. And most fake stories are very close to this level of ridiculousness as soon as you think about it, as the more ridiculous a story is the more you would want to believe it.

Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Fake, this was a video published by The Onion, a satirical news website

Often one of the better ways of finding out the veracity of information is to look up the information or the source it came from online. Often one of the best websites for this is <a href="https://www.snopes.com/">Snopes.com</a>, a fact checking site for urban legends. However, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a> also works for checking publishers.

This headline seems believable, although a bit extreme. However, if you look up the article, you'll be able to see it came from <a href="https://www.thebeaverton.com/">The Beaverton</a>, a satirical news website.

Often in misinformation there are discrepencies that can be noticed if you look closely enough, which reveals the information to be fake.

Misleading visuals are another way that misinformation is spread. These two graphs are from Fox News and the numbers do not match the graphs at all, purely due to how short one of the bars are compared to the other.

To summarize this book, there are a few points you should know for spotting disinformation.

1. Look for misspellings and punctuation errors - these often give away that the information is fake or misleading. 2. Try to find discrepancies about the article, such as one title being used instead of another. 3. Consult external sources about the publisher of the information or the website you're reading it on, some people don't realize that some news sites are satire despite it saying so on their front page. 4. Ask yourself, "Is this believable?" If the answer is no, then it is probably fake. Note that none of these will always work 100% of the time, you'll have to use the tips provided and decide for yourself whether the information you're reading is real or fake.

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