The habit is simple. When you feel strong emotion — happiness, anger, pride, vindication — and that emotion pushes you to share a “fact” with others, STOP. Above all, it’s these things that you must fact-check. Why? Because you’re already likely to check things you know are important to get right, and you’re predisposed to analyze things that put you an intellectual frame of mind. But things that make you angry or overjoyed, well… our record as humans are not good with these things. As an example, we might cite this tweet which recently crossed my Twitter feed: You don’t need to know that much of the background here to see the emotionally charged nature of this. President Trump had insulted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic Senator from New York, saying tears that Schumer shed during a statement about refugees were “fake tears”.  This tweet reminds us that that Senator Schumer’s great grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis, which could explain Schumer’s emotional connection to the issue of refugees. Or does it? Do we actually know that Schumer’s great-grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis? And if we are not sure this is true, should we really be retweeting it?

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Read laterally: Read laterally.[1] Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network. Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.