Russell Newton discusses how to spot fake news online using Albert Rutherford’s book ‘Stop Being Fooled’. Learn the Socratic Questioning technique and the SIFT method for verifying claims on social media and beyond. Understand why people believe false information, how viral misinformation spreads, and protect yourself from manipulation by spotting lies online before they take hold.

Join Russell Newton as he dives into personal development and media literacy, sharing wisdom on how to spot fake news and misinformation in our digital age. With insights from experts like Albert Rutherford and his own experience as an audiobook narrator, Russell teaches us critical thinking skills like source verification and the SIFT method to stop being fooled by online claims and viral disinformation.

You’ve shared something online, a post, a headline, did you know?
And later, maybe a day later, maybe a year later, you found out it wasn’t true.
It’s not a huge deal, right?
Except somewhere out there, someone believed a story just like that one hard enough to walk into a building with a gun.
That’s not hypothetical.
That’s a real thing that happened.
And the person who did it, it wasn’t stupid.
He was just fooled.
The same way we all get fooled, just with lower stakes.
Most of the time.
I narrated a book recently called Stop Being Fooled, a practical guide to spotting fake news, weak arguments, misleading evidence, and AI deception.
This was written by Albert Rutherford, a regular author here on this channel.
This is one I’ve come back to since finishing it, because it opens with a story that stuck with me.
December, 2016.
A pizza shop in Washington, D.C. called Comet Ping-Pong.
A guy named Edgar Welch walks in with a gun because he’d read online that the restaurant was the center of a child trafficking ring run out of a presidential campaign.
It wasn’t true.
There was no ring.
He served four years for it.
Now, the thing that gets me isn’t that he believed something false.
It’s why he believed it.
Rutherford points to research showing it’s not carelessness, it’s sociology, psychology, and something called the illusory truth effect.
The more times you see a claim, the more your brain starts treating familiar as true, even when nothing about it has actually been verified.
Think about the ads that promise results in three days, or the secret they don’t want you to know.
First time, you scroll past.
Fifth time, some part of you has started to believe it a little, just from the repetition.
Nothing about the claim changed, only your exposure to it did.
So, the instinct is to swing the other way.
Distrust everything.
Trust nothing.
Rutherford pushes back on that, too.
And I think he’s right, too.
If you believe nothing, you’re just as easy to manipulate as if you believe everything.
You’ve just traded one bad habit for another.
What you actually need isn’t more suspicion.
It’s a process.
And this book hands you two of those.
The first tool, or the first process, is Socratic Questioning.
It goes back to Paul and Elder’s work on critical thinking, and Rutherford adapts it into five steps you can run on any claim before you believe it, share it, or act on it.
Here’s the example from the book, and it’s a good one, because it sounds exactly like something that would show up in your feed.
Eating candy causes measles, but doctors don’t want parents to know.
Let’s run through it in the five steps.
Step one is to clarify.
What is this actually saying?
Well, it turns out this one is two separate claims stacked together.
The first, candy causes measles.
And the second, doctors are covering it up.
Most people react to the whole sentence at once and never notice that there’s actually two claims here.
Step two, probe the assumptions.
Name what the claim is quietly relying on, in this case that candy can cause measles, that doctors know it, and that they’re hiding it.
Say those out loud and they already sound a little thin.
Three, look for the evidence.
Is there a study, a named expert, anything to check?
Here, no.
And it also happens to be flatly wrong.
Measles are caused by a virus.
The first assumption collapses before you even get to the second one.
Step four, consider other viewpoints.
What would your doctor say?
If you were a skeptic, what would you say?
You do this instinctively with a phone bill you don’t trust, you call and ask.
Information deserves the same treatment.
Step 5.
Consider the consequences.
This is the one that Edgar, the gunman we mentioned earlier, skipped.
If you act on a false claim, what’s the actual damage?
For him, it was four years for a parent panicking over candy.
It might mean pulling a kid out of trick or treating over nothing.
So Socratic questioning interrogates the claim itself, but Rutherford makes a point that stuck with me.
A claim can survive that whole process and still be a lie because the source behind it was never checked.
That’s what the second tool is for.
It’s called SIFT, developed by digital literacy researcher Michael Caulfield.
So SIFT is an acronym.
S is for stop.
That just means you pause before you share.
Do you actually know this topic or this source?
I investigate.
Investigate the source means checking whether it’s a real outlet with editors and a track record, or a page that exists just to create outrage.
If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.
which sounds on its own like he’s dismissing every business owner’s work.
But the fuller quote is about roads, teachers, infrastructure, the argument that no one succeeds in a total vacuum.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.
There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we had that allowed you to thrive.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you got a business, you didn’t build that.
Somebody else made that happen.
Clipped four seconds, it means almost the opposite of the full paragraph.
That’s what tracing a claim back is protecting you from.
Now, Rutherford frames these two, Socratic Thinking and Sift, as a pair.
I think that’s the right way to hold on to them.
Socratic questioning turns inward on the claim itself.
Sift turns outward on where it came from.
One keeps your emotions from making the decision for you.
The other keeps you from mistaking a confidence source for a correct one.
Run both, and most fake news falls apart before it ever gets to you.
So Edgar Welch, the misinformed gunman from earlier, didn’t skip these steps because he was foolish.
He skipped them because he was moving fast and feeling something.
That’s the exact condition fake news is built on.
The five-second pause this book is asking for?
That’s the whole difference.
If you want a deeper walkthrough, don’t be fooled by Albert Rutherford as the book.
I narrated it, and it’s worth the full listen.
New videos here every week.