The four moves
Professional fact-checkers do not read a suspicious page harder. They leave it. These four moves are what they do instead, and you can run them in about thirty seconds.
- 1
Stop
Notice the feeling before you scroll on, share, or argue. Content built to travel is built to produce a reaction first and a thought second. A jolt of anger or vindication is not evidence that a claim is false, but it is a reliable sign that someone optimized this to move.
Do I actually know what this site or account is?
- 2
Investigate the source
Open a new tab and look up the outlet or account, rather than reading its own About page. A self-description is marketing. What you want is who funds it, what other people say about it, and whether it existed a year ago. Professional design tells you nothing. Design is cheap.
Who publishes this, who pays for it, and who benefits if I believe it?
- 3
Find the original
Most of what you see is a repackaging: a post summarizing an article summarizing a press release describing a study. Each hop loses caveats and gains certainty. For an image, run a reverse image search, because a genuine photo with a false caption is the most common form of all.
Where did this first appear, and does the original say what the post says it says?
- 4
Trace the claim
If something cites a study, a number or a quote, follow it. 'Studies show' with no link is not a citation. A statistic with no denominator is not a statistic. A quote in a screenshot is not a quote, because screenshots take under a minute to fabricate.
Can I reach the actual thing being cited in two clicks? If not, why not?
What this method is not
It is not a way to tell whether something is true by looking at it. Detection by eye does not work reliably and it works less well every year. In the Veriff Deepfakes Report 2026, a survey of 1,000 US adults, average detection of manipulated video scored 0.07 on a scale running from minus 1 to 1, where zero is random guessing.
That is the whole reason the four moves are about context rather than pixels. You are not trying to out-stare a forgery. You are checking whether a real, findable, accountable source stands behind the claim.