From a Washington Post story by Heather Kelly headlined “How to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation about Ukraine”:

Anyone with a phone and an Internet connection is able to watch the war in Ukraine unfold live online, or at least some version of it. Across social media, posts are flying up faster than most fact-checkers and moderators can handle, and they’re an unpredictable mix of true, fake, out of context and outright propaganda messages.

How do you know what to trust, what not to share and what to report? Here are some basic tools everyone should use when consuming breaking news online.

From a story on grid.news by Anya van Wagtendonk headlined “Can fact-checking solve the misinformation pandemic?”:

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting was awarded to PolitiFact, a then-upstart fact-checking initiative, for its coverage of a bruising presidential campaign.

The presentation of journalism’s highest honor to what was then a novel idea — using “probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine … political claims,” as the award described — marked a turning point for the nascent fact-checking industry.

More than a decade later, fact-checking is a global phenomenon, with 300 websites in 80 countries. Many partner with legacy media outlets and the largest tech platforms on Earth.