So today a group known for pranks circulated an imposter site that posed as the Washington Post, announcing President Trump’s resignation on a post-dated paper. It’s not that hard for hoaxers to do this – any one can come up with a confusingly similar url to a popular site, grab some HTML and make a fake site. These sites often have a short lifespan once they go viral — the media properties they are posing as lean on the hosters who pull the plug. But once it goes viral the damage is done, right?

It’s worth noting that you don’t need a deep understanding of the press or communications theory to avoid being duped here. You don’t even need to be a careful reader. Our two methods for dealing with this are dirt simple:

• Just add Wikipedia (our omnibar hack to investigate a source)
• Google News Search & Scan (our technique we apply to stories that should have significant coverage).

You can use either of these for this issue. The way we look for an imposter using Wikipedia is this:

1. Go up to the “omnibar” and turn the url into a search by adding space + wikipedia
2. Click through to the article on the publication you are supposedly looking at.
3. Scroll to the part of the sidebar with a link to the site, click it.
4. See if the site it brings you to is the same site

Here’s what that looks like in GIF form (sorry for the big download).

I haven’t sped that up, btw. That’s your answer in 12 seconds.

Now some people might say, well if you read the date of the paper you’d know. Or if you knew the fonts associated with the Washington Post you’d realize the fonts were off. But none of these are broadly applicable habits. Every time you look at a paper like this there will be a multitude of signals that argue for the authenticity of the paper and a bunch that argue against it. And hopefully you pick up on the former for things that are real and the latter for things that aren’t, but if you want to be quick, decisive, and habitual about it you should use broadly applicable measures that give you clear answers (when clear answers are available) and mixed signals only when the question is actually complex.

When I present these problems to students or faculty I find that people can *always* find what they “should have” noticed after the fact. But of course it’s different every time and it’s never conclusive. What if the fonts had been accurate? Does that mean it’s really the Post? What if the date was right? Trustworthy then?

The key isn’t figuring out the things that don’t match after the fact. The key is knowing the most reliable way to solve the whole class of problem, no matter what the imposter got right or wrong. And ideally you ask questions where a positive answer has a chance of being as meaningful as a negative one.

Anyway, the other route to checking this is just as easy — our check other coverage method, using a Google News Search:

1. Go to the omnibar, search [trump resigns]
2. When you get to the Google results, don’t stop. Click into Google News for a more curated search
3. Note that in this case there are zero stories about Trump resigning and quite a lot about the hoax.
4. There is no step four — you’re done

Again, here it is in all it’s GIF majesty:

You’ll notice that you do need to practice a bit of care here — some publishers try to clickbait the headline by putting the resignation first, hoping that the fact it was fake gets trimmed off and gets a click. (If I were king of the world I’d have a three strikes policy for this sort of stuff and push repeat offenders out of the cluster feature spots, but that’s just me). Still, scanning over these headlines even in the most careless way possible it would be very hard not to pick up this was a fake story.

Note that in this case we don’t even need these fact-checks to exist. If we get to this page and there are no stories about Trump resigning, then it didn’t happen — for two reasons. First, if it happened there would be broad coverage. Second, even if the WaPo was the first story on this, we would see their story in the search results.

There’s lots of things we can teach students, and we should teach them them. But I’m always amazed that two years into this we haven’t even taught them techniques as simple as this.