Satire and very biased or blatantly false stories often masquerade as legitimate news, especially in the social media environment.
Likewise, it is common to find images with what looks like a caption presented as though they are news stories themselves. Sometimes, the “story” was true/true-ish originally but the photo/caption misrepresented or exaggerated the situation, or the situation was long ago resolved or has passed. In many cases, though, these are manufactured solely to generate outrage.
These "stories" are often produced by networks that mutually link them. This gives a misleading impression that the information is vetted and reported in multiple outlets. These items also tend to be shared often, which gives an illusion of legitimacy. Because lack of truthfulness might not be immediately obvious, it is absolutely essential to fact check any story or image that appears news-like.
Legitimate news sources don’t hide their identity. Be extremely skeptical if you cannot determine who authored a story, and where or how it originated. If you are able to trace a story back to a website, evaluate that site for credibility. If you can find an originator of a social media story, look them up to see if they are a legitimate news source, or a known purveyor of fake news.
Wikipedia has a list of known fake news sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
Start fact checking here:
Wikipedia is a good source for purposes like fact-checking, but instructors usually do not consider it an academic resource for use in a research paper/project.
The Lateral Reading evaluation strategy is especially helpful when evaluating information from social media. See here for more information.
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