Understanding how we use and consume information is more important than ever. It's becoming harder and harder to tell legitimate sources from those are spreading lies and misinformation.
APL librarians have created an 8-part video series to show you some helpful techniques for how to spot a fake and evaluate your media sources.
Fact Checking Tools
Botometer
Botometer (formerly BotOrNot) checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.
Use of this service requires Twitter authentication and permissions.
FactCheck.org
A nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Hoaxy
A tool that visualizes the spread of articles online. Articles can be found on Twitter, or in a corpus of claims and related fact checking. There are two search modes. Articles search finds claims and related fact checking in a limited corpus of articles from low-credibility and fact-checking sources, dating back to 2016. This mode leverages the Hoaxy API to retrieve relevant articles, accounts, and tweets. Twitter search lets users track articles from any sources posted on Twitter, but only within the last 7 days. Twitter mode uses the Twitter Search API to retrieve relevant, popular, or mixed tweets matching your search query. It is compatible with all advanced search operators. At most, Hoaxy is capable of visualizing the top 1000 accounts and in the case of a Twitter search, this will be the most recently active 1000 accounts if sorted by Recent.
Points of View
Resources that present multiple sides of an issue.
PolitiFact.com
PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others on its Truth-O-Meter.
Snopes.com
A fact checking website that is known for sorting out myths and rumors that appear on the internet. It has also been seen as a source for validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in popular culture.
