We've all been there, every time we tell ourselves "it’s too good to be true," but we still latch on and buy into the hype.

​It isn't new, the world has been saturated with media for centuries, and we usually take what's in front of us at face value, especially when it’s designed to look like something you should trust.

The world is often split into extremes, in one article you might find someone suggesting media is evil, corrupt and untrustworthy, but click the next link and on the same website you'll have someone suggesting that media is the only defense we have against social issues.

​Like most opinions, reality lies somewhere in between. Sure, some pieces of media are corrupt and do their best to manipulate you. While it should not be the consumer's job to figure out what they can or can't trust, someone has to do it. This is where media literacy comes in.

​Constantly fact checking everything you come across on social media is nigh impossible. There is too much content to practically approach even half of everything posted hourly, however, there are plenty of ways to immediately figure out if something that seems too good (or too bad) to be true, is.

​The first and most obvious? Click the link. Make sure it’s safe first and comes from a website you recognize, but once you’re clear, click it. An article that recently caught my attention was a post on Facebook explaining how millennials are too lazy to eat cereal, because it takes too long to clean up. Yeah… that’s a real article that someone was paid to write.

​As you’re reading through an article, you should find sources, right? Well click those sources. See where they take you. The cereal article, for example, mentions a study about millennials not eating cereal, but doesn't explain the results of the study or where the data is from and does not link to the study at all. The only source in the article takes you to a different article about a decline in cereal sales, this article’s only source? The U.S. Census.

​Even though it isn’t linked and the title/authors aren’t mentioned, this article also briefly mentions the same cereal avoiding study.

​Alright, now that you’ve clicked through the sources, you can probably consider yourself in the clear, right? This article obviously doesn’t have any backing to it, so now you can move on with your life knowing it was just written to get views and that’s that.

​But… come on, you want to know for sure, right? If an article mentions a study, but doesn’t link it, odds are you can find the study somewhere just by Googling enough of the headline. Looking for “cereal sales millennial decline” brings you to plenty of other articles that wanted to cash in on the same headline. But if you go to the dreaded second page of google, you can find the actual citation.

​There you find the survey in question, which upon reading mentions biases from the start: the age ranges they surveyed were “statistically unbalanced” (Mintel, Hot and Cold Cereal). They even go on to suggest what more reputable data centers would've compared their results to, but also let the reader know that they don't intend to use that information. Additionally, they mention that the survey itself is misleading, since they include both cold and hot cereals, but input that into the data as one specific outcome.

​Hot cereals, of course, refers to grits, oatmeal, gruel, and porridge. All of which are actually a real pain to clean up. But 9/10 of the articles I found that mention this study show pictures of corn flakes or fruit loops. In fact, one of the articles eventually goes on to describe the booming market of gourmet (cold) cereal for children.

​So, are millennials too lazy to eat cereal? According to this study, the data is biased and should be retested. Did several journalists use that data anyway to produce less than ethical headlines in order to generate clickable titles? Yes! Yes they did.

​This isn't meant to make you cynical, because for every article that suggests something that isn't entirely true, there are articles that do their best to correct it. In fact, there are several articles written by millennials that even go into detail about why this is a dumb thing to worry about. Plus, it is important to remember that it's a lot easier to find bad actors because they stand out.

Media literacy is the key to identifying these kinds of articles and not allowing yourself to be influenced by their work.

​Now, clicking the article doesn't always work, because sometimes the "news" is in the form of a post or an image. First thing you should do is look for any source on the image or in the post, there most likely won't be one.

​IN this case, your safest bet is to just look up whatever they're saying. Generally, if it’s something popular, you'll end up on Snopes, which is a great way to quickly confirm or deny a story. There are dozens of other fact checking websites out there (that include sources) just to defend consumers from falsehoods.

​If there is no source, that’s when you have to do the research on your own. Look up the information. I constantly get image posts about “green moons” and other once in a lifetime celestial events. Things that sound super cool, but also… kind of ridiculous.

You can easily look up any “fact” that is posted on an image or a tweet. Just keep in mind that searching something online often produces results similar to what you search. So, if you google "vaccines bad for children," you'll probably get articles with that in the title or the body, but if you google "vaccines good for children," you'll get the exact opposite. Just make sure your searches withhold bias.

​In my case, I googled “green moon event.” And, sure enough, the results all explain that it is not scientifically possible for the moon to spontaneously turn green for a single night. Who would have guessed?

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If you'd like to learn more about being media literate and are interested in the history of media, I strongly recommend you check out Crash Course's Media Literacy series. Keep in mind sources like this could even have their own biases, but that shouldn't stop you from having an open mind.