- WordPress is the most popular web platform for building websites that look and function professionally in a snap, and many fake news sites use it to host their sites. Bigger news outlets that get tons of traffic and have very intricate back-ends and front-ends for functionality and security reasons, making it less likely to spot signs of WordPress in their source code.
- To determine whether the news site you're looking at is a simple self-hosted WordPress site, simply right click on the site you want to investigate and select View Page Source. You'll see a bunch of complicated code appear in a new window, and all you have to do here is type Ctrl+F or Cmd+F to bring up the keyword search function in your web browser.
- Try searching for keywords like: wordpress, wp-admin and wp-content. Any signs of these and you'll know that this might just be a simple site that was set up quickly using the WordPress platform.
- To be clear, just because a site is made with WordPress doesn't mean it's fake news. It's just another possible indicator (because it's so easy to set up a site based on WordPress).
2.Examine the Domain Name of the Site You're Reading
- Make sure you click on the article to view it in your browser before sharing it. Unfortunately, resharing articles that have juicy headlines before even clicking on them first is a huge part of the problem. It's just too tricky to tell whether a story is fake or not by looking at the headline in your social news feed or in your Google search results.
- Sometimes it's real easy to spot a fake news site just by looking at its domain name,or its URL. For example, ABCNews.com.co is a pretty well-known fake news site that aims to trick readers into thinking it's the real ABCNews.go.com. The secret lies in looking for extra sketchy looking words that may accompany brand names and whether the site ends in something most reputable sites don't use. In this example, the .co at the end of the URL. CBSNews.com.go and USAToday.com.co are two other examples.
- If a site has a neutral kind of name that could possibly be legitimate—likeNationalReport.net or TheLastLineOfDefense.org (both fake news sites, by the way)—you'll want to move on to the next step below.
3.Run Your Story Through This Search Engine for Hoaxes
One of the most helpful tools available to those of us who want more thorough answers beyond what a few extra Google searches show us has to be Hoaxy—a search engine built to help people visualize and determine whether something they find online is fake or real. A joint project between Indiana University and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Hoaxy has been designed to help people determine whether something is real or not by tracking and integrating social sharing of links published by trusted, independent fact-checking organizations.
Once you've run a search, Hoaxy will give you the results it can find for claims (suggesting they may be fake) and results from related fact-checking sites. While the search engine doesn't tell you exactly whether something is fake or real, you get to at least see exactly how it has spread online.
Be sure to check out Hoaxy's FAQ section to find out more about how it tracks and analyzes data.
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