Read the headline last: skills for checking things yourself

You won’t always have a fact checker on hand, so this desk is about the moves we use, written so you can use them too. Read the first three paragraphs before you believe the headline. Find the date on the source. Ask what a statistic is a percentage of. Search for the image before you trust its caption.

None of this needs special software. A reverse image search, a search engine with quotation marks and a little patience will settle a surprising share of what lands in your feed. The harder skill is noticing the moment a claim feels too satisfying, because that’s when people skip the check.

Coming up on this desk: plain guides to misleading headlines, manipulated images, deepfakes and the statistics tricks that turn a small change into a scary one. The feed below collects careful work from Full Fact worth reading slowly.