Finding and verifying information

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The house hippo is here to remind you to check before you share anything you see online. Find out how below!

Information on how to search and how to authenticate information. Both are essential skills to master if we want to end up with relevant and reliable information.

Most of us turn to online sources for news, whether it’s reading a newspaper online or sharing a news story with our friends and family. But news stories are one of the hardest things to verify: sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on social media and people may spread false reports for political or commercial reasons, or just for “fun.”

Informed voters are essential to the democratic process, but in our modern news environment it can be difficult separating facts from propaganda. This section will explore how to read election and political news critically, how to recognize misinformation and disinformation, and how to be a more active and engaged consumer of political news.

Two of the most important kinds of information we look for online are about health and science. This section looks at how we get news and information about health and science topics, types of misinformation that are particularly common in those subjects, and steps we can take to determine how reliable a source or claim is.

Thanks to the internet, today we’re not just consumers of news but broadcasters as well – and our friends and families are counting on us to only share accurate, reliable information.