In 2018, three scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a study. After one of the researchers noticed a rise in false news on his Twitter (now X) feed, he wanted to delve into how widespread of a phenomena this truly was.

To do this, the experimenters analyzed an approximate 126,000 cascades of widespread news stories. These pieces were tweeted over 4.5 million times, by an estimated 3 million users. They tracked an 11 year period of these stories shared on the platform from 2006-2017.

Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who was one of the three researchers reported,

"We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,".

The researchers found that fake news stories had a 70% higher chance of being retweeted compared to true news stories. It also discovered that it takes true news stories six times longer to reach 1,500 people than false ones.

This isn't only a concern on X.

A 2020 study analyzing 3000 Americans' social media use leading up to the 2016 election was published in the journal, Nature: Human Behavior. Researchers found that only 6% of the time, Facebook referred users to reliable news networks and it referred them to unreliable news networks around 15% of the time.

A similar 2021 study in regard to the 2020 election was conducted, and the results from Facebook were similar.

But there are several methods recommended by experts that people can utilize to check the reliability of a source.

Check the Sources

News articles tend to have a list of sources at the bottom of the page. These cited sources are the places in which the author found their information for their piece, they are the ones they trusted enough as their only sources of information.

Some people do not look at these, they just read the article and automatically go by what is stated there assuming the author knows did their homework.

But, sometimes, they did not do their homework perhaps as extensively as they should've, and the sources they used to develop their thesis are ones extremely one sided, not fully researched themselves or are contained with numerous lies that have been debunked.

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Look into the Author

Research the author of the news article themselves.

Does he or she have a history of well rounded journalism? Composing works well researched and truthful? Or, upon a simple Yahoo search of their name, does a myriad of pieces by multiple people come up bashing their name as a dishonest, agenda driven journalist who has a history of spreading lies for their own gain?

Are these claims true, or baseless slander? If there is merit to those accusations, and the journalist has a reputation for unreliability, their work may not be trustworthy.

Check Multiple Places

If a story is legit, in a very wide majority of cases, multiple reliable platforms and journalists will be discussing it. Is this the case? Or is this one author somehow the only one reporting this supposed ground breaking news?

If this is the case, the article may not be trustworthy.

Check the Domain/URL

One tell-tale sign is the URL (the link to the article). Are there any misspellings? What is the domain?

The domain itself can be a sign the news one is reading should not be taken as fact, even if there are no grammar mistakes.

According to research engineer, Chris Larsen, some of the least trustworthy domains include .stream, .country, .review, .gdn, .download among others.

Is there Bias?

Is the article biased?

Perhaps, the writer is discussing a feud between two celebrities and it seems apparent the author has a preference for one figure over the other. If this is the case, it'd be wise to do more research into this particular scandal because the author of this piece could be, even unintentionally, skewing facts in the favor of the person they are more fond of.

Maybe they're not, but readers can research this question.