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Surprisingly - anyone!

Yes, anyone with a digital device and an internet connection, can create and publish content online.

Online content can be created and published by:

• governments
• large companies
• popular celebrities
• smaller groups like charities and schools
• groups of friends
• one person as a hobby

The short answer? Everywhere!

There are many different ways to publish content on the web. You can:

• create your own website and publish webpages
• publish content to a social media profile
• add comments to other people's online spaces

All these different places to publish your content are sometimes called platforms.

You can set up basic web publishing accounts and profiles for free on many platforms.

Always speak with a trusted adult before opening any online accounts. It's worth remembering that you will have to share your personal data when you open an account.

Unfortunately without some of our own detective work, we don't!

There are two main types of inaccurate or incorrect content.

• Disinformation is when someone purposely publishes or shares false information to deliberately mislead others. This is often called fake news.

• Misinformation is when someone publishes or shares inaccurate information by mistake. They haven't checked for errors, to see if the information is out of date, or known to be false.

With a little detective work, you can find reliable, accurate news and information on the web. A good place to start is by finding out who created the online content.

Let's look at the website address or URL (uniform resource locator).

The part after www is called the domain name. It can tell you who the website belongs to. Look for names and organisations that you trust.

The last part of the URL has clues about the type of website it is.

• If it ends with .sch.uk then it is a school website.
• A college or education website ends in .ac.uk.
• A government website ends in .gov.uk.

If the domain name is not familiar then look for a link on the webpage called About us or Who we are.

If you can't find out who makes the content, then this might mean that it is unreliable.

Unreliable web content can sometimes be easy to spot. It's often:

• badly written
• disorganised
• full of spelling errors
• out of date information

Images may look squashed and the text might be difficult to read. It's often obvious that not much care has been taken when creating the content.

Disinformation or fake news can be harder to spot.

The content creator often wants people to believe their unreliable content. They may try to do this by making their content look similar to other well-known and trusted sites. So they will usually take great care to make it look good.

Once you have found what looks like reliable information on a website, it is still a good idea to check the information for accuracy.

A good way to do this is to check the same piece of information on more than one website. This is called verification.

If you can find the same information or news on other website and platforms, then you have probably found reliable and accurate information.

Verification is a great way of checking information and facts are reliable.

Fake news and opinions can spread very quickly on social media platforms. This is called going viral.

It can be easy to think news and opinions on social media are always reliable. If you find a news story on social media, you can try verifying it by visiting Newsround or other well-known and trusted websites.

Digital technology makes it easy to edit and change (manipulate) photos so that they look totally different.

This is often a sign that information is unreliable. You can sometimes tell by looking closely that an image has been manipulated.

If you're not sure about an image and think it might be fake, then you can search for the same image using areverse image search. This will let you see where else it has been used on the web.

If you can see that the image has been copied or manipulated to look different, then you might have found some fake news.

If you find online disinformation or misinformation that is clearly untrue or inaccurate, you can report it to the web platform that published it.

Tell a trusted adult who will help you to report the content to the right people.