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No, this is not about fact-checking the current president’s tweets, though they are often false. This is about how people can fake tweets from his twitter and other people fall for it (so many people, including some of my Facebook friends).

This particular tweet went viral earlier this week, and it’s not real.

atweet

How do we know it’s fake? It looks like a real tweet, right? Well, there’s its ridiculousness and misspelling, but that can be believable nowadays. But you can also easily fact check if a Trump tweet is genuine. First you can use Twitter’s own Advanced Search. You can use it to search words or phrases or all tweets on particular dates by a particular person. It’s very handy.  But with Trump in particular, you can also search on the Trump Twitter Archive website, which has a handy search function.

There’s no need to just guess at whether a tweet you see is genuine–there are ways to do the research before you spread misinformation–or you can spread it as long as you make clear you know it’s fake and a joke.

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Truth
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Here’s a good article on How to Spot Truth in the Sea of Lies, Rumors, and Myths on the Internet.

Political memes are the worst for lies that spread like wildfire. I’ve seen them lying for both sides. For instance, both of these are lies from the last presidential election:  http://www.snopes.com/1998-trump-people-quote/ and http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-stupid-quote/

Just take a moment to check. If you don’t have a moment to check, maybe you don’t really have the free time to be posting, anyway.  Go to the original source if you can. If you can’t, just google some more sources.  Check if you’re on a satire site.  Think about if the article/meme/blog post in question is just confirming your own bias and you’re not thinking it through.

I’m guilty of it, too, so I’m not saying I’m not. I’m saying let’s all be a little more careful.

Oh and can we try to be polite and not call each other repuglicans and libtards or other dehumanizing names?  We’re all human–except for the Twitter bots, of course.  We can all hate those.

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Counterfeit Authentic Magnified
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Here are some ideas for checking photos and videos you see online.

A handy tool for photos is https://www.tineye.com where you can do a quick reverse image search. For an example, during the last presidential election, I saw a photo on my Facebook feed of Hillary Clinton shaking hands with Bin Laden. It’s not real. It looked photoshopped and it took very little time to find out it’s from a photoshop contest from a website. It’s o.k. to have differing viewpoints. It’s not o.k. to swallow misinformation without at least a quick check.

Check for altered video (you also can’t believe every video you see).

Submit photos for forensic analysis.

Another easy way to fact check a video is if you see a short excerpt or clip from a video that enrages you, maybe check for a longer version before you share your outrage. This comes from both sides of the political spectrum (and from outside politics). Here’s an example involving Trump supposedly ignoring a disabled child.

Look, if you think you don’t have time to double check before you share a photo or meme, maybe you don’t have time to share at all.