A fact is only as good as where it came from. Check the address before you trust the delivery.

Information arrives without its history attached, which is what makes it so easy to repeat. A claim that has been through four repostings looks identical to one someone actually verified, and confidence in the telling has no relationship to whether it is true. Treating the source as part of the fact is the only reliable defense.

Before you pass something along, spend thirty seconds finding where it originated. Who said it first, and did they have any way of knowing. If the trail stops at someone repeating someone, you have a rumor rather than a fact, and it costs nothing to say so.