Ask HN: How do you deal with lies on the internet?

The Russia - Ukraine War, Covid 19, the previous couple of elections. I'm wondering how you personally deal with possible deliberate misinformation on the internet. Lately I've begun to doubt every source of information that could possibly be shared because of financial, political, or misplaced altruistic motivations. So I've been ignoring as much as possible.

What is your approach to gathering and filtering information? Current events or otherwise.

This is just my opinion, and fwiw I might be totally wrong or off-base, and I am open to suggestions:

Consume your news from multiple sources across political, cultural, and social spectrums. Know where each source comes from, and who is paying for it. Familiarize yourself with what are generally considered "objective" sources as well. So, in the instance of the Russia/Ukraine war, I've been using wikipedia, because it more or less states the facts of events as they happen, without too much bias. So I can make my own opinions. And since it is open-source, everything there faces tons of scrutiny.

Follow the trail to the source. Oftentimes, all the major news outlets will cite the same source for an event, but lace the story with their biases in the process. Usually, that single source will only have so much information themselves, so it's easy to see where the other sources' biases take over.

Another comment mentioned Wikipedia, and I'll add it can be also useful here, as it's an easy way to verify if a common factoid on a matter origins from a legitimate source.

I give it time. I'm not likely to be of any use against the war on Ukraine so I'm getting weekly updates for it

Same with Covid, Trump, etc prior. I don't personally need to know this stuff in realtime and I'd probably mentally unravel if I tried to keep up with it all

What helped me a lot was moving everything from "X is..." to "Y claimed X is..." thinking. Then it's easier to spot groups, research them, assign them some mental trust level per-topic, adjust it later, etc. There's nothing wrong then with always keeping "but they may be wrong" in mind. But you'll find a reasonable consensus on reality with time.

Also backing out of stupid places quickly is great. I.e. don't confuse a post on Twitter from someone you trust with the responses to that post. It's going to be almost completely trash if the original poster is even semi-known. They exist in the same area, so need active mental separation.