Tips On Link/Information Sharing During a Pandemic, Election, and Other Potential Social Upheavals
There are easy steps to making sure you aren’t contributing to the spread of misinformation.
5 min readJun 23, 2020
Here’s a quick breakdown of sources and how to verify what you are sharing, by basic journalistic standards:
- Primary sources are necessary, and these are just as they sound: The original site of a point of information. An interview, a press release, a briefing, a conference, legal document, wire service release, etc. If you can, try to find more than one primary source that confirms the information.
- Secondary sources report on the primary source, sometimes adding analysis that may lean toward a political position.
- Tertiary sources report on the spin shared by secondary sources as if it’s fact and often don’t even link to the primary source because it can contradict the spin being promoted.
- Opinion pieces are two pronged. If it’s by an expert talking about their expertise as pertains to a situation, it can be considered a primary source. Digging deeper, not all experts are the same. For example, an expert in holistic medicine is not a virologist or…
