Obviously we’ll never be able to post perfectly sound advice or accurate news stories 100% of the time, but it doesn’t hurt to double check your sources. It only takes a moment.
If your article if from The Onion it is satire. No one actually ate those babies/stole plutonium to make a Frankestein type monster/whatever ridiculous thing. (Girl ignorantly complaining about Anne Frank because of Justin Beiber for instance.)
For missing persons posts—Google the person’s name to see if they have already been found. Most times they have. If you can add a status and date to your reblog? That’s helpful. I usually add “Still missing as of today’s date.” Or “Found on date.”
If your story source is a blog post and not a news source—you may want to note that the story may be highly biased, inaccurate, or made up. (Of course that happens with legit news sources too. Grain of salt. Being able to find more than one source for a story helps.) And let’s face it—I get news from Twitter and Tumblr more quickly than the New York Times or the BBC. I think the accuracy ratio is maybe 50% for Twitter though, especially as an event is unfolding. (Avoids discussion on nature of truth.)
Medical or emergency information should be verified. Posting the wrong things to do when someone is having a heart attack or the wrong number to call during an emergency doesn’t help anyone. And I think most of you genuinely want to help other people.
I’ve definitely made the error of trying to post resources for disasters and conflicts and found a problematic source or organization because I didn’t understand the situation or didn’t research carefully enough.
You can verify a lot of anecdotes that advise you how to avoid various terrible things through Snopes.com.
We’ll all make errors and that’s OK. It happens, but it’s worth taking 30 seconds and Googling before you reblog.
