Seven Questions to Ask Before You Share

The moment that matters

Almost all of the damage that misleading content does happens after someone shares it. Before that point it is one post seen by a few people. After it, it carries your name, your relationship with the people who see it, and their assumption that you checked.

That makes the share button the highest-leverage place to intervene, and it is also the easiest, because you only need to slow down for about thirty seconds.

Why a pause works

There is experimental support for the idea that the problem is often inattention rather than belief. In a series of studies published in Nature, Pennycook and colleagues found that people were frequently willing to share headlines they would have rated as inaccurate if asked directly, and that a simple prompt drawing attention to accuracy shifted what participants subsequently shared toward more reliable sources [1].

The reason this works is that the sharing decision and the accuracy judgment usually happen in different modes. A feed rewards speed and reaction. Accuracy requires a deliberate question. The seven questions below exist to force that question into the moment before the share, when it can still change the outcome.

The seven questions

1. What exactly does this claim?

State it in one sentence. Vague content is hard to check precisely because it is vague. If you cannot say what it asserts, you cannot vouch for it, and sharing it means passing on your own confusion.

2. Who produced it, and how do I know?

Not the account that posted it. The origin. A screenshot of a headline is not a news story. A quote card is not a quote. If you cannot find the original within a few clicks, that is a finding, not a dead end.

3. When did this happen?

Old content recirculating as new is one of the most common forms of misleading material, and it usually requires no manipulation at all. A real photograph of a real event from six years ago, posted today without a date, misleads by omission.

4. What evidence is actually shown?

Distinguish what is documented from what is asserted. A video shows what is in the frame. It does not show what happened before the recording started, who is off camera, or what the people involved intended.

5. What is this designed to make me feel?

Strong emotion is not proof of falsehood. Real events are often outrageous. But content engineered to travel tends to be built around high-arousal reactions, and noticing the intended reaction gives you a moment of separation from it. Vosoughi and colleagues, analysing a large corpus of cascades on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, found that false stories spread further and faster than true ones, and that false stories were associated with replies expressing surprise and disgust while true stories drew sadness and trust [2].

6. What would I expect to see if this were true, and do I see it?

If a major event happened, several independent outlets would ordinarily be reporting it. If a public figure said something extraordinary, a full recording would usually exist. Absence of the expected corroboration is meaningful information.

7. What happens if I am wrong?

Some content is low stakes. Some content names an individual, alleges a crime, gives medical guidance, or concerns an ongoing emergency. Raise your standard in proportion to the consequences, and be willing not to share at all.

Worked example

Someone forwards you an image of a flooded street with the caption: “This is happening right now in our city. Officials are saying nothing.”

Working through the questions: the claim is that a specific flood is occurring in your city at this moment and that authorities have not commented. The origin is a forward with no attribution, so question two already fails. Question three cannot be answered from the image. Question four notes that the image shows water on a street, not a location or a date. Question five identifies the intended feeling as alarm plus grievance at official silence, a combination that reliably increases forwarding. Question six is decisive: if a serious flood were underway, local emergency accounts, transit alerts, and weather services would almost certainly show something. Question seven raises the bar further, because emergency misinformation can send people toward danger or away from real instructions.

The right action is not to share, and the useful response to the sender is a question rather than a correction: “Do you know where this came from?”

Practical exercise

For the next three days, apply the seven questions to every item you are tempted to forward, and keep a one-line note of the result. At the end, look at which question stopped you most often. That question is your personal weak point, and knowing it is worth more than memorizing the list.

Summary checklist

• I can state the claim in one sentence.
• I know where it originally came from.
• I know when it happened.
• I can distinguish what is shown from what is asserted.
• I have named the emotion it is built to produce.
• I checked whether the expected corroboration exists.
• I have considered the cost of being wrong.

References

Numbered citations in the text above correspond to the entries below.

1. Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A. A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592, 590-595. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2
2. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559

Next step

Print the seven-question checklist

Topics covered: Media LiteracyInformation Manipulation