What can I actually do?
Chapter VII
Defense skills
Practical habits that take a minute and save you from most of it.
- The SIFT method Four quick moves (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to the original) that sort most online claims in about a minute.
- Lateral reading Instead of studying a page to judge it, leave it: open new tabs and see what the rest of the web says about the source, the way professional fact-checkers work.
- Reverse image search How to find where a photo or video really comes from with Google Lens, TinEye and InVID, and read the result for the earliest copy, the crop and the real date.
- Checking domains and dates A one-minute habit for the address bar and the dateline: spot lookalike domains, unmask short links, check when a site was registered and when the article was actually written.
- Pause before sharing One question (“is this actually accurate?”) asked before you hit share measurably cuts the spread of false stories. Three questions, ten seconds, and what to do if you already shared.
- How to talk to a relative who believes it Debunking at the dinner table rarely works; questions, curiosity and a shared way of checking do. A warm, realistic guide to the long game: what to say and what to skip.
- How and where to report Where a report actually goes (platform buttons, your rights under the EU Digital Services Act, bank and police for scams, fact-checkers that take tips) and when reporting just feeds the troll.