How to detect Faux News posts

This morning, as I was going over the Facebook stream with My morning coffee I ran into a friend sharing up the following:


This screen capture shows what should be a fairly believable story about a car crash that was caused by the new game Pokemon Go. A short bit of research quickly returned results that show this article actually comes from a Faux News site called Cartel Press.  As these stories are becoming more and more the normal, thought it was time to actually write a bit of a guide to detecting and verifying the stories that come across our Social Media feeds.

Step 1: GOOGLE THE STORY!

If the topic of a suspected Faux News article is in fact actual news, the chances are Google will have it in their News section, and with multiple sources available. CNN, MSNBC and other news wires should also be reporting on the topic.

 However, since not all sources these days actually verify and vet their articles before sharing them, this is not a 100% one and done solution, which brings us to the next step

Step 2: GOOGLE THE WEBSITE!

In the case of our above link, We know that Cartel Press is the Website which posted up this article, but what do We know about this Website? Again, Google becomes your friend. Here is the Google Results for Cartel Press


The first thing you will notice is that Google lists this site as a “News” source, but that is not actually Google’s fault as this happens more from the back end coding of the Website and how it tells Search Engines to catalog their site. Next look at the “articles” being returned for this site.

The top one is the afore mentioned “Pokemon Go: Major Highway Accident After man Stops in Middle of Highway to Catch Pikachu!” story, following up on that is the article about a Pokemon Go playing Teen being stabbed and mugged for their device and then an article about claiming that login issues with Pokemon Go are the work of ISIS.

But take a look at that 4th listing under News. Specifically the Website and categories listed, It’s the old faithful source of debunking Fake News, snopes and an article that debunks the story about a Teen being stabbed.

It should also be noted that Cartel Press is actually owned by another faux news site, huzlers.com. Huzlers claims in the footer of their own website the following



So, now We have at least one case of this site going with Faux News, but lets not just leave things at this point.

Notice how the original article has a picture of this reported Highway Accident? This brings us to step 3.

Step 3: REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH ANY IMAGES IN THE ARTICLE

One of the best tools (and browser plugins) I have found for this is a site called tineye.com . Tineye allows a user to either upload an image or if they have the plugin in their browser right click and perform a reverse engine search.  As you can see by the image below, when the picture of the crash from the Pokemon Go article is reverse searched, We discover a few things


1. The combo of the Crash photo and the Pokemon Go Logo return 121 Results

2. Sorting by earliest crawl dates (the date the image first is picked up by search engines) We see that the photo of the crash actually dates back to March 2nd 2014. Meaning this image of a crash that “Just happened” is in fact over 2 years old at the time of the publication of the Pokemon Go article

3. It would appear that the first posting of this image actually is credited to the Washington Times a news paper located no less than 383 Miles away from where the story reports the crash having happened

and

4. by clicking through on the Getty images link We discover this



 this crash from 2014 actually happened on Interstate 25 in Denver Colorado with there being one fatality and 20 injuries thankfully.

Step 5: LOOK THE ARTICLE OVER FOR ANYTHING ELSE YOU CAN RESEARCH

The article We have been using for the purpose of this post closes out with a line that reads

“The hashtag #dontpokemongoanddrive has since started trending on social media.”

but has it really been trending? A the time of writing this blog shows 52 instances of it on Twitter and 3 public post instances of it on Facebook, which calls into question the validity of it being a “trending hashtag”


So, there you have it people a short guide on how to Validate and Vet “News” stories online before sharing them up.