Should be shown to every female over the age of 8.

Some possible answers:

- Convergent validity – look for agreement between two ‘different’ sources. Different meaning different agendas, different political philosophies
- Peer review
- Is it replicable?
- Is it statistically significant – meaning is the occurrence of an event something that would happen under average circumstances or is it so unusual it suggests there were one of more factors that truly caused it.

Organizational changes that could support greater confidence in the news:
- Use fact checkers
- Make it clear when information is based on a single source or is based on anecdote
- don’t run pictures, videos and diagrams from suspicious sources
- Fire reporters who knowingly falsified stories
- Turn credibility and availability of evidence into a marketing asset.
- Pay or come up with another incentive for readers who can PROVE a parts of a story are incorrect

I personally prefer finding ways to offer incentives for finding facts rather than punishing reporters. I think reporters are already under enough stress doing their daily jobs. And the point isn’t to shame people who make mistakes but to reward outside sources if they can prove what is true.

It also encourage the public to be more involved in the news and I imagine it’s cheaper to reward a citizen who can prove a fact than to have people on staff whose jobs are to do fact checking.

Some grist for the mill.

Good question, thanks for bringing it up.

TruthSquad.com provides a platform that could be used for what you’re looking for. We’re open sourcing the code at GitHub, if anyone wants to adapt it for the purposes you describe.

Also look up the work that Dan Schultz is doing at MIT with Truth Goggles, if you haven’t already. And Dan Whaley’s Hypothes.is peer annotation system also looks promising. Neither will be available for a year, but worth watching.