As part of our Know Peace Online campaign, we’re exploring how truth-telling and discernment shape our digital presence. This week’s focus is “Know Your Facts.” In an age where misinformation spreads faster than ever—and new tools like AI-generated content make falsehoods harder to spot—fact-checking is no longer optional. Evaluating what we see and share online is essential to building a digital world grounded in integrity, empathy, and justice.
As we navigate the digital landscape, each of us needs to steer carefully, developing the skill to ask questions, evaluate, and double-check the veracity of the information we encounter.
Fake images, preposterous claims, and inaccurate information are all over the digital world, creating what experts have come to call information disorder. Much of this content disparages or disrespects others and creates problems, on and off-line, for its victims. Media injustice flourishes when much of the content available daily isn’t true.
Becoming skilled information and fact evaluators is critical, and with the increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI) generated images, new evaluation strategies are required. We are no longer solely checking words. We also need to evaluate images—real-life likenesses that may depict made-up events or dispute recognized historical and scientific knowledge.
Knowing how to figure out what is true—and what is not—is challenging, even when a person is intimately acquainted with information sources and understands the digital rules of the road. For years, sites like Snopes.com and Factcheck.org have effectively identified what we then called “fake news.” However, the term fake news feels somewhat antiquated, now that it is routinely used as a label when individuals disagree with something.
All in all, evaluating information in 2025 is more complicated than it used to be, and significant damage can occur when untruthful information aimed at hurting a person or vulnerable group is amplified and goes viral.
Libraries and librarians at public and educational institutions of all levels have devoted considerable time and effort to clarifying how to examine and identify digital information. Go to almost any library website or ask a librarian, and you will be directed to information that can sharpen your fact identification skills. And don’t forget, libraries always welcome people who lack digital access in their homes.
For example, the Princeton University Library website has an entire section devoted to examining various types of information. As it explains, two key questions you should ask when evaluating content are:
1. Authority: Who wrote/sponsored it? Is the author an expert in the field or just someone relaying their personal experience? Is it a company or a person? Do they have any credentials (a degree, certification, training or extensive experience) that indicate they’ve studied the topic, worked in the field or have recognized expertise? Are there sources/citations referenced? Is there a way to contact the author?
2. Purpose: What do they want me to do with the information? Is the purpose to sell, persuade, entertain or inform? Does it seem objective and impartial? Does it acknowledge conflicting information/opposing viewpoints? Are there words and images present that seem designed to appeal to your emotions? Is a political, ideological, religious or cultural point being made?
Other resources are worth exploring:
- DW, the German international news site, offers information about evaluating digital resources and even features a Real or Fake Image Quiz.
- In a post at The Conversation website, librarians share their strategies in Verifying Facts in the Age of AI.
- A section of the Denver Public Library website focuses on spotting misinformation.
- The University of Tampa Library Fact Checking page is filled with helpful links and resources.
- Almost every college or university library and news website includes a section on image and fact evaluation—the list goes on and on.
Faith communities, with their emphases on ethical and moral behavior, can also address problems created by disordered information. This Know Peace Online campaign is helping to bring tools to UCC members and others.
Several years ago, the Episcopal Church shared Misinformation, Disinformation, Fake News: Why Do We Care? Other denominations—many of these organizations have themselves become victims of information disorder—are just beginning to address digital issues.
Pope Leo XIV, in his first month as the leader of the Catholic Church, has already stated that addressing the problems created by AI is one of his goals, and his predecessor, Pope Francis, strongly urged Catholics worldwide as well as the Catholic media to check facts.
It all comes down to the questions we were taught to ask early in our educational lives, and now critical to truth-telling in the virtual world: seek factual answers to who, what, when, where, and why. Then look for other authoritative sites that confirm your understanding. If information is unconfirmable, it should not be shared or amplified. When you become adept with this process, it only takes moments to check facts.
The early idealistic dreams about the Internet bringing the communities of the world together worked in many ways. Still, few appreciated the possibility that the environment could become one that aims to separate people from one another. Strategies that focus on truth-telling and fact evaluation are key to making the digital world more equitable and trustworthy.
As part of the Know Peace Online campaign, take a moment, maybe once per week, and really test out the content you see online—it will help you and everyone who uses the Internet.
Marti Pascale Weston, a member of the UCC Media Justice board of directors, is retired after a long teaching career at schools in the Washington and Chicago area. In 2015, she was recognized as an Outstanding Educator by the International Society of Technology Educators (ISTE). Throughout her career, she has focused on digital world access and ethics. Join Marti in taking the Know Peace Online pledge today.