I’ve had a ton of conversations on my personal Facebook feed recently where people are genuinely confused about which news outlet to trust. I — and many of my colleagues — have offered several fact-checking and news bias-rating sites, including the Associated Press AP Fact Check, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and AdFontesMedia. USA Today even has its own fact-checking pages and election fact-checking site.
Other great go-to’s here include the U.S. Cybersecurity Agency’s rumor control site, web browser plug-in NewsGuard — which rates more than 4,000 news websites based on their records of publishing accurate information, and Ground News, which shows you how many top outlets have covered a story at a glance. (Spoiler, if no major news organizations have covered it, there’s a good chance it’s false.)
Videos are harder, but if you’re a bit more tech-savvy, install the browser plug-in InVID on Firefox and Chrome. When you’re watching a video, you can click on the tool, then click on the “Keyframes” button and paste in a video link and click “Submit.” InVid pulls up important frames of the video for you to reverse image search to see if they are legitimate or fake.