How to spot a fake articles and real articles

This page lists ways to spot garbage or scam written content and ignore it.

This is a developing page. As I find more keywords I'll add them here.

Fake articles

In essence, if a headline contains the following list of words or sentence structure, you can safely ignore it. Fake articles are basically hype that gives you hope personally of being saved from your daily troubles. Generally, good news is fake and bad news is real, unless it affects you or your immediate social circle. So, some examples of fake news would be cures for obesity, cures for cancer, easy money solutions, etc. Examples of real news would be trials that show some promise on some forms of obesity or cancer, and articles which tell you how to save money rather than "quick fix" money solutions. 

Scam articles in general, appeal to lowest-common denominator features of humanity: sex, vanity, food, greed, personal finance problems, seeing the future, etc. Real articles appeal to humanity at large, e.g. politics, war, economics, pandemics, science. 

Definition:

Clickbait: an article headline designed to trick you into clicking on it, so that you view an article which has lots of adverts on it, so that the article author earns money from you looking at their adverts.

Here are some samples.

1. Man/Woman [verbs] [noun], [some consequence]. For example "Man finds snake in toilet, gets bitten". Low-quality anecdotal content with no relevance to you personally. Another example, "Some Celeb shows off midriff, sets hearts racing with revealing pix". Same structure: [some person] [verb] [noun], [consequence]. Ignore, it is clickbait.

2. "Cleanse" and "superfood" followed by [some organ]. For example, "Just eat this superfood and you will cleanse your pancreas". Guaranteed nonsense. I assure you if you click on the "article" it will contain a sponsored link to the vendor that sells the "superfood".

3. "This". Any article title containing the word "this" without expanding what "this" is, is clickbait. For example, "You can live 10 years longer if you just eat this superfood", or, "You can't get rid of belly fat because you are doing this wrong exercise". Delete and ignore. The answer is almost always blueberries or gojiberries, and the wrong exercise is pushups. No, they do nothing, and yes, pushups are good.

4. [Some rich person] predicts [some economic situation] and says you should [some action]. For example, "Elon Musk predicts stock market crash, says you should HODL Scamcoin-X". <- Ignore. It's most likely an advert for Scamcoin-X and you are going to get scammed.

5. Articles whose title ends on a question. The answer is "No" about 99.9% of the time. For example, "Is Putin going to drop a nuke on Antarctica?". No. No he is not.

6. "[Some rich person] got rich thanks to [some pyramid scheme], be your own boss!" <- Anything you have to pay to join or sign up ultimately exists to keep you paying. It's a parasite. Do not fall for anything that promises you wealth. Wealth comes from (a) being useful, (b) networking, not from hard work OR from running your own business (per se). Those are just there as part of (a) - being useful. You can be useful and come up with cool ideas and still fail (e.g. see Tesla vs Edison). Edison was just better at marketing.

7. "Scientists find cure for cancer." No. Read it again. They found a cure for most cases in their small study group of people with a very specific cancer. Cancer is NOT one disease, it is a type of disease, just like Flu and Covid-19 are viruses, but the Flu vaccine won't prevent Covid-19. For a specifically interesting case, look at HPV. The virus of HPV causes cervical cancer! Whereas liver cancer is caused by alcoholism or pancreatic cancer. Not all cancers are the same! And not all viruses cause cancer.

8. Listicles that show you the list, one item per page, and you have to click each page, to see each item in the list. E.g. "10 reasons your girlfriend wants to break up with you." Guaranteed that each reason exists on its own page, surrounded by about 40 adverts. Ignore, it is clickbait.

Real articles

To repeat: scam articles appeal to lowest-common denominator features of humanity: sex, vanity, food, greed, personal finance problems, seeing the future, etc. Real articles appeal to humanity at large, e.g. politics, war, economics, pandemics, science. Real articles generally refer to doom and gloom. 

Here are some examples.

1. [Some superpower] invades [some country]

2. Mass shooting [in USA somewhere]

3. [Some despot] declared president [of anywhere], "vote totally not rigged," says Mr Despot.

4. [Some disease] detected in [some country notorious for exotic diseases], "will probably come to your country and kill you."

5. [Some rich person/ Some politician/ Some celebrity] caught doing [something bad they have been doing for years], "people shocked". 

6. [Scientist] discovers [something] which promises [something way more than the scientist actually said. To get what they actually said, go read the original scientific article.]

7. [Some technology company] premiers [some new technology] which will solve [some problem] [but it does not]

8. [Some natural disaster] strikes [some area with poor people] [some large number of houses and people] die/destroyed

9. [Currency] devalued and/or Interest rate/Inflation increased due to [some made up nonsense reason which has nothing to do with a cause and effect relationship.]

10. [Company/stock exchange] goes bankrupt/crashes due to [some shenanigans]

11. [Some innocent person] killed by [some force, e.g. racist or cops] in USA.

12. Outrage at [some disgusting behaviour] [some interest group] [demand]

The above pretty much summarises the news in any decade/year since the start of newsprint.

Hard to tell

With some article headlines, it's not easy to tell if it is fake news, just from the headline. As I think of more I'll put them here. But here are some ambivalent cases:

1. [Drug] cures/prevents [disease]! ... On this one it depends. You need medical knowledge to tell. Example of fake: "Ivermectin cures covid" (fake). Example of real: "Vaccines prevent covid". Ask yourself what you're scared of (medical science), and if the article promises a cure NOT endorsed by medical science, then no, it's fake.

2. [Celebrity] has died! ... On this one, you have to look at whether it is April 1, and if it is not, then look at which news site. If the site is The Onion, Facebook, Twitter or similar, ignore. If the site is AP, Al-Jazeera, BBC, or CNN or something, yes, believable. You can also take into account whether you know they had cancer or were really really old.

How to get proper content

So if so much content online is garbage, how do you get accurate, scientific content, and avoid being scammed?

1. When you search for content, add universities to the search. Universities do not publish garbage, generally, and generally they do not operate on a for-profit basis. Choose your country. Let's say you want American universities' answers. Then add "Site:.edu". Like so:

Do bananas cause belly fat? site:.edu

No, they don't.

If you want British universities, add: "Site:.ac.uk". Other sites in the English-speaking world with reasonable content are Australia (.edu.au), New Zealand (.ac.nz), South Africa (.ac.za), and Canada (.ca). Do not fall for sites with believable sounding names which end on .net, .com, or .org. A lot of these are conspiracy sites (.net, .org) or for-profit sites (.com).

2. Ignore social media. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc., are all pretty unreliable except the official channels of official organisations.

3. Subscribe to reasonable news publications. In general, news sites outside USA but inside the English-speaking world, are reasonable, but some are hype or gossip sites. You can tell if a site is reliable by the number of celebrity gossip articles it contains. If it has a lot of those articles, beware that the content may be hype or inaccurate. 

An easy way to tell is to ask whether the provider had or has a paper version. Quite often, online publications that have paper versions as well are more reputable, simply because they have to carry the cost of printing a paper version. Setting a news site up is cheap and easy, anyone can do it and afford it, so a paper edition is some indication that the site is serious.

Good sites/sources for general news include:

• Associated Press (USA)
• Al Jazeera (UAE)
• BBC (UK) 
• CNN (USA)
• MSN (USA)
• IOL (South Africa)
• Daily Maverick (South Africa)
• The Guardian (UK)
• Mail and Guardian (South Africa)
  

4. For science-specific news, try ScienceDirect and Nature.com, and learn where the academic journals are stored. Try Academia.Edu, Researchgate.Net, BioRxiv, MedRxiv, PhysRxiv, Phys.org and related. The academic journals are the most reliable information sources on science. All scientific papers start with a summary called an "Abstract". Read it very carefully.

5. Wikipedia. Contrary to what you may have heard, Wikipedia is very good and highly accurate. Most of its content is from academics and academic journals. I've personally checked pages under my area of research expertise and am always impressed by the high quality.

6. Learn to spot domain names and watch out for ones that are dodgy. For example, if you get a "Competition invitation" and clicking on it takes you to a website outside your country, it's probably fake. In fact, anything online which promises free money or a prize, is almost certainly fake.

The web address gives you the clue. Scammers usually will set up a website that looks like the company "running the competition", enough to fool most people. But they can't hide the website address. Let's use an example, let's say you think Apple is running a competition. 

The following are fake:

www.apple.com.mx/competition/x34fsdfs/ - fake because it is in Mexico (Apple is not registered in Mexico) - it should be USA (plain dot-com). Plus, it has a garbage ticket number on the end to conceal itself from the real owner of the website.

www.applecomputers.ru/competition/x34fsdfs/ - fake because it is in Russia (again, Apple is not registered there), and the company name is Apple Computer (singular).

www.appel.com/competition/ - fake, this is an example of typosquatting (occupying a website domain name which contains a typographic error precisely because someone will make a typographic error and stray onto the site.). 

www.shorturl.com/x34fsdfs/ - fake because they are using the shortURL service to hide the URL. ShortURL and similar services do make garbage-looking ticket numbers on the end, so in this case, the ticket number is not the fake part. Once you click a short URL it will take you to a real URL that is concealed, and it will probably be something fake like the above two cases. 

The following is how a real URL from Apple would look:

www.apple.com/competition/ 

Note how it is clean and human-readable, and the domain is apple.com (correct).

More examples:

Fake: www.cnn.org ; www.msn.net ; www.realcleartruth.org ; www.globalconspiracy.org

Real: www.cnn.com ; www.msn.com ; www.psych.ox.ac.uk/publications/1249851

Avoiding Bias

Ignore pseudo-subversive discourse / narrative. A lot of fake sites and conspiracy theories appeal to cognitive weaknesses held by humans in general, namely, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, Confirmation Bias, and the False Equivalence Fallacy. They do this by alleging that they are "just seeking the truth" and "just asking questions" and "just wanting to hear both sides of the story". Or, more assertively, they might sometimes talk about "the mainstream media" or "the scientific establishment" and how these are organisations that "spread lies". This narrative appeal works in the sense that it aims to elicit our natural skepticism towards truth claims and specifically towards authority and authoritarianism. So, to cast doubt on anything, all that you do, as a conspiracy theorist, is say "Well that may be true but I want to hear the other side of the argument," or, "Well that may be your truth but you are clearly just supporting the status-quo in science". Meantime, when it comes to some things like vaccine efficacy or the theory of evolution, there is no other side. 

In the first case, Dunning-Kruger Effect, it is our overconfidence in our expertise in a given area, when our level of expertise is in fact so low that we cannot tell that we lack expertise. For example, in my own case, I would not dare question results from CERN, because my physics is only undergraduate level, but I would definitely question statements on www.realphilosophicaltruth.org - because that is under my area of training. Most people lack this humility, particularly around their health, and assume that because they know how they feel (scared, nervous, sore stomach, etc) that they are the expert on their own body. They certainly are not. 

In the second case, confirmation bias, this is where we search for information that already agrees with our pre-existing prejudices. For example, how many of us have searched for "a random controlled trial of vaccine efficacy against Covid-19 and side effects site:ac.uk"? I am sure the people who know how to search for that know how science works. However, many more people are likely to search for "vaccine injury" because that is what they fear. That is an example of confirmation bias. To get rid of confirmation bias, you have to search for the opposite of what you believe. E.g. "vaccine injury debunked site:ac.uk". 

In the third case, False Equivalence, this is where you contrapose two opinions or hypotheses and allocate them a prior probability that is similar or the same. Prior probability is the probability of the hypothesis prior to observations/experimentation. So, for example, a person who is religious would allocate the Theory of Evolution a low Prior (e.g. 0.3) and allocate Creationism a high Prior (e.g 0.7). Hence, when they see the govermnent teaching evolution in schools, they think that this is unfair because they think that the Theory of Evolution and Creationism are two equal or similarly-equal theories worthy of equal consideration. They aren't. The evidence supports Evolution overwhelmingly (0.9999). The evidence in favour of Creationism is minimal to nonexistent (0.0001). Hence, allocating a high Prior to creationism is False Equivalence.

If you can spot these three fallacies in your own reasoning, you can get more accurate answers. The way to do it is to (a) assume you do not know; (b) look for arguments that disagree with yours and see if they are published in proper journals, and (c) do not assume that your theory is right, rather assume it is false. This I call the Popperian Approach. Karl Popper tells us that nothing in science is proven, it is merely refutable. Hence, anything that is NOT refutable in principle is NOT science. So, if you find that your theory has no refutations, but you can think of cases where it might be shown to be false, then you have grounds for accepting it. However, if you find one strongly supported scientific refutation (in a journal), you have grounds for rejecting it. Similarly, if you cannot think of anything that would refute your theory, then you definitely do not have a scientific theory. 

Let's look at some examples.

Science: If I add 2 mol hydrogen to 1 mol oxygen and heat it, I will get energy release and 1 mol of water. Why is this science ? Because we can (a) test the claim and (b) refute it if the test fails.

Non-science: Water is made of ethereal spirit, which is a universal spirit that I know about because I learnt about it in a trance when I took some magic mushrooms. Non science: why? Because you have not defined "ethereal spirit" and you have not provided a way to test your statement.

This leads us to the question of Burden of Proof.

If you want someone to believe something that you believe, you must provide the proof or supporting evidence. "It has not been refuted yet" is not quite good enough (peace to Karl Popper on that).  It is not up to the person listening to your theory to accept your theory without evidence, and, more importantly, without saying how the auditor could refute you. It's also not up to the auditor to tell you why they do not believe, if you have not provided grounds to believe. The best example is flight. If I say I can fly without assistance from a machine, but refuse to demonstrate or offer any proof, clearly, you have no grounds to believe me, and you will think I am delusional. The same applies to any theory at all, scientific or not.

Another example of non-science:

"The world is run by a cabal of lizard aliens. If this was not true, why did they take down David Icke's videos?" 

Why is this unscientific? Because if you say "they take down his videos for spreading fake news", the believer will say, "Aha that is proof that it is true because they censor him! It's a cover-up!", whereas if YouTube does not take down his videos, the believer will say, "Aha, that is proof that it is true because if they DO take them down then we will know it is true, so NOT taking them down is a cover-up." In short, there is no refutation condition for the claim that the world is run by lizard-aliens, because there are an infinite number of ad hoc explanations that a conspiracy theorist can come up with to support his case.