Key points
- WHO's method for navigating health information has seven steps: assess the source, go beyond headlines, identify the author, check the date, examine the supporting evidence, check your biases, and turn to fact-checkers.
- Misinformation is false information shared without intent to harm; disinformation is false information created to profit or cause harm. The intent is the difference.
- Before sharing, WHO suggests asking: how does this make me feel, why am I sharing it, how do I know it is true, where did it come from, and whose agenda might I be supporting?
- If you know something is false, or if it makes you angry, do not share it to debunk it or make fun of it — that spreads it further (WHO).
Direct answer: Check a health claim before sharing it the way WHO suggests: assess the source, go beyond the headline, identify the author, check the date, examine the supporting evidence, check your own biases, and turn to fact-checkers. Before sharing, ask how it makes you feel, why you are sharing it, how you know it is true, where it came from, and whose agenda you might be supporting. If it fails those checks, do not share it — sharing is publishing, and a share from a trusted friend carries more weight than the original post ever did.
Three different words
WHO draws a sharp line between three words that are often used as one. Information is things that are accurate to the best of our current knowledge. Misinformation is false information that was not created with the intention of hurting others: it is often started by someone who genuinely wants to understand a topic and cares about keeping other people safe, and then shared by others who feel the same. Everyone believes they are sharing good information — but they are not, and depending on what is shared, misinformation can turn out to be quite harmful.
Disinformation is different in intent, not in appearance. It is false information created with the intention of profiting from it or causing harm — to a person, a group of people, an organisation or even a country — and it generally serves some agenda. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO notes, disinformation was used to try to erode trust in other people and in government and public institutions.
The distinction matters because the response differs. Misinformation is corrected with better information. Disinformation is a matter for the platform and the publisher. And a claim can also be true but misleading — a genuine figure taken out of context, a real quote cut to reverse its meaning — where the facts check out and only the framing is wrong. For the wider skill this method sits inside — finding, understanding and using health information — see what is health literacy?.
The seven steps
WHO’s guidance for navigating the infodemic sets out seven steps. They are worth working through in order, because each one catches a different kind of failure:
- Assess the source. Who shared the information with you, and where did they get it from? Even if it is friends or family, you still need to vet their source. For websites, check the About Us and Contact Us pages for background and legitimate contact details.
- Go beyond headlines. Headlines may be intentionally sensational or provocative. Read past them before deciding what a piece actually says.
- Identify the author. Search the author’s name online to see if they are real or credible.
- Check the date. Is it up to date and relevant to current events? Has a headline, image or statistic been used out of context?
- Examine the supporting evidence. Credible stories back up their claims with facts. Look for expert quotes, links to statistics or studies — and check whether those links actually support the claim.
- Check your biases. Think about whether your own biases could affect your judgment on what is or is not trustworthy. A claim that confirms what you already believe deserves the same checks as one that challenges it.
- Turn to fact-checkers. Consult trusted fact-checking organisations, such as the International Fact-Checking Network, and global news outlets focused on debunking misinformation.
No single step settles a claim. A real author can still be wrong, a recent date does not make a claim true, and a page with an About Us section can still be selling something. The steps work together: a claim that passes all seven is worth sharing; one that fails any of them is worth holding.
Checking images and video
Images and video deserve their own check, because they are the easiest to reuse out of context. A photograph from one event, one year or one country can be attached to a claim about a completely different one — and the image will feel like proof even when it proves nothing about the claim.
For an image, search by the image itself to find out where else it appears online: if the same photograph turns up attached to an older story, a different place or a different claim, it is being reused. The tools WHO’s article names for this are the reverse image search tools provided by Google and TinEye. For a video, check when it was uploaded and what information the platform gives about it — an old video reposted as if it were new is one of the commonest forms of misleading health content — and for videos WHO’s article names Amnesty International’s YouTube DataViewer, which extracts thumbnails that can be entered into reverse image search tools. Those tool names come from Gavi’s republication of the WHO article (26 October 2020, “This article was first published by the World Health Organization”): the who.int page itself does not name them, and this guide cites Gavi, not WHO, for the names. (The republication spells the video tool “DatViewer”; the correct name is DataViewer.) WHO’s step 4 applies here too: ask whether a headline, image or statistic has been used out of context.
Five questions before you share
Before sharing anything, WHO suggests asking yourself five questions:
- How does this make me feel?
- Why am I sharing this?
- How do I know if it’s true?
- Where did it come from?
- Whose agenda might I be supporting by sharing it?
And one rule: if you know something is false, or if it makes you angry, don’t share it to debunk it or make fun of it. That just spreads the misinformation or disinformation further. The same applies to sharing something to ask “is this true?” — the share itself does the spreading, whatever the caption says.
Good places to go for reliable information, in WHO’s words, are the websites of your national Ministry of Health or the World Health Organization. If neither says it, that is evidence — not proof it is false, but a reason to wait. Test the skill on five claims with sources attached in the Myth or Fact Quiz.
What this guide does not do
This guide gives you a method, not a verdict. It cannot tell you whether any particular health claim is true — that takes the original source, the evidence behind it, and sometimes an expert. What the method can do is show you when a claim is unsupported: no source, no author, no date, no evidence. An unsupported claim is not necessarily false, but it is not ready to share.
This page also gives no medical advice. It is about information, not about health decisions: checking a claim about a treatment is not the same as deciding whether to take it, and no checklist replaces a clinician or an official health authority.