Before I was up to my elbows in information technology, I was a journalist, with a degree and everything. Those journalistic techniques, standards and values stuck with me, even as I ventured into other areas of endeavor. You tell the facts. That’s the basics. This is why fighting fake news is so important to me and, really, it should concern you, too.

Fake news doesn’t come from only one political viewpoint, nor does it care about who it hurts, left, right or center. It’s propagated to influence your actions and profit those who create and disseminate it. Everyone has forwarded a sensational post on social media. It’s just too easy to do.

“When facts are false, decisions are wrong.” That’s the bottom line. Most fake news is not a mistake. It’s a deliberate effort to manipulate us. It’s propaganda. It’s meant to divide us, make us disbelieve true facts, and to have us behave in ways that benefit the perpetrators. We now know, from many reliable sources, that fake news heavily influenced our last general election. It’s poised to do the same with our upcoming mid-term election if we let it.

There are also campaigns to make us not act in our own best interest. Someone is benefitting from it, certainly, and discovering who that is will help us be better informed about these issues.

Let’s start with some techniques to identify potential fake new:

• It is highly dramatic, outrageous, or makes you react strongly.
• It fits perfectly with your world view. Seldom do real facts fit with someone’s opinion 100% of the time.
• It’s from a source you don’t know or that has a highly patriotic-sounding name.
• It is from only one source. No other news organization has published it.
• The article shows a lack of understanding of the language. Yes, bad grammar and misspellings usually mean that the article isn’t correct either.
• The sites or articles aren’t quite right for the culture. That usually means that someone foreign is trying to imitate us.

Once you suspect that something might be fake, how can you find out for sure?

• Check on a site that parses fake news, such as Snopes.com or StopFake.org. They are journalists who do the research to see if articles, pictures or videos are indeed true.
• Check with other, reliable news sources, ones who have fact-checkers and an editing staff, to see if this news item is being reported. If not, it’s probably fake.
• Do a google-image search for pictures that may have been faked. If you see lots of variations of it, then it’s been doctored. Look for the oldest version, to see what it originally was. Many times, the pictures are correct, but the descriptions are altered. (Eagles players who knelt to pray before a game were relabeled as kneeling during the anthem. Naughty Fox News!)
• For videos, search for them on YouTube to see where they originated. Fake ones may have several versions or completely different attributions than are reported in the news article.

To be a truly informed person, who knows the facts, you need to do your own research. There are many vested interests out there who are banking on an uninformed populace. Don’t be part of that. How do you become better informed?

• View news from reliable, fact-checked sources, such as the BBC, Reuters, CBC, AP, scientific journals, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or any other creditable newspaper. Local news is also more creditable and in-depth than much of our national news. (There are a few exceptions, namely, some nationally owned (Sinclair) TV stations.) Don’t use social media as your only source.
• Stop passing fake news around. Fact-check it. I can’t stress this enough.
• Go have discussions, face-to-face, with others who are different than you. You’ll find that our conservative/liberal differences are amazingly unimportant. We all want to live our lives in peace, with a bit of security, and we all love our children. Those fundamentals just never change.
• Travel. Get outside the United States and see why the world has a very different opinion of us than we do. You’ll be amazed.

The next time you see some meme about a pedophile ring in the back of a pizzeria (someone got arrested for that one) or boy scouts burning the flag (um…it’s what you’re supposed to do to properly dispose of them, according to flag etiquette), check yourself and check your sources. Otherwise, I’m just going to slap you on the wrist for propagating propaganda. You know I’ll do it.

Of course, if you want to learn something from the fake news creators, there’s always the “Russia Propaganda Guide to Stealing Your Roommate’s Burrito“.