Information hygiene: a daily routine that takes 15 minutes

Series: How minds are moved · Living with it: self-defence for the mind · 2 of 4

In the 24 hours before I wrote this, my news engine, LSN News, saw 191 new stories big enough to be carried by 20 or more outlets each. On average, each of those stories ran on 43 outlets but came from only 17 independent voices, and 57 of them had three voices or fewer. What looks like the whole world talking is often far fewer newsrooms than it seems, copied. Add the alerts, the headlines written as questions and the first explanations that turn out wrong, and you have a daily drip that wears down anyone’s judgement.

This post is the practical one. Not a theory of manipulation, but a routine you can run in about fifteen minutes a day that makes you much harder to move by things like that.

Contents · 12 sections

TL;DR #

• Turn off news notifications. Choose when you read, not when something else decides.
• Read slow: yesterday’s big story today, after the first, wrong explanations have been corrected.
• Count voices, not outlets. One article on 384 sites is still one article.
• Read one story in at least three sources from different countries or directions.
• Before you share, stop, open a second source, and ask whether the headline answers its own question.
• Treat fact-checkers as one more outlet: useful, sometimes late, never the final word.

Why a routine and not a rule #

The previous post showed that most persuasion is weak. What wears people down is not one clever message but a steady drip: alerts, headlines in the form of questions, the same copy on hundreds of sites, a feeling that everything is urgent and nothing is settled. You do not defend against a drip with a single act of willpower. You defend against it with habits that are cheap enough to keep.

Here is mine, built while I was building LSN News, which reads around 340,000 articles a day in 67 languages and groups them into stories.

Minute 0 to 2: notifications off #

Go to your phone’s settings and switch off notifications from news apps and social media. Keep the ones from people.

A breaking alert is written in the first minutes of a story, when almost nothing is known. It also decides when you think about the news, which is the most valuable thing you have. In the Microsoft 365 outage of 12 November, the first explanation that spread in some outlets was “unusually high demand”. Microsoft’s own status updates said the load was not driven by an increase in traffic. In LSN News, 14 outlets carried the “demand” version, and 13 of them were US local TV sites running one identical headline. The correct wording appeared a little later and spread to 53 articles. If you read the first alert, you got the wrong cause. If you read the next morning, you got the right one.

Minute 2 to 5: read yesterday’s news #

This is “slow news”. Do not read stories that are an hour old unless you must act on them. Read yesterday’s biggest story today.

By then, the first claims have been confirmed or dropped, the official statements are out, and the outlets that made early mistakes have often corrected them. It costs nothing. You lose the thrill of being first, and you gain the much rarer pleasure of being right.

Minute 5 to 8: count voices, not outlets #

When a story seems to be everywhere, ask how many people actually wrote it.

On 12 November, 362 outlets ran the exact same headline within six hours: “iHeartRewind 2026: Check Out iHeartRadio’s Top Artists & Songs Of The Year”. Every one of them was a station site of the same company, promoting its own year-end list. In LSN News that story shows 384 outlets but 5 independent voices. Harmless, but it shows the mechanism. The same pattern carries news: in the same days, one headline about a helicopter emergency landing ran on 562 sites, and one about a retailer’s bankruptcy on 491, mostly radio-network and wire copies.

That is the pattern behind the numbers at the top of this post: big does not mean many-sourced.

How LSN News counts: outlets that run the same title count as one voice, and every other outlet counts as one. That is a floor, not a ceiling of honesty. Two outlets rewriting the same agency copy in different words still count as two, and many voices can repeat one error. It is corroboration, not truth. On any site you can do a rough version yourself: open three copies; if the first two paragraphs match, you are reading one article three times.

Minute 8 to 12: one story, three sources #

Pick one story you care about and read it in three sources that differ: different countries, different owners, different political leanings. Not to find the “true” one, but to see what each chooses to put first.

LSN News shows this well. The Kraków shooting on 7 November ran in 60 languages. Among English-language headlines, 490 mentioned the suspect’s far-right views. Among 600 Russian-language headlines, none did, and 74 mentioned Russian citizens among the victims. Same event, different first sentence. Neither is necessarily false. Each is a selection, and you only see the selection when you put them side by side.

If you read several languages, use them. If not, machine translation of headlines is good enough for this exercise.

Minute 12 to 15: check before you share #

This is the habit with the best evidence behind it. A full ten-minute method for checking a claim, with primary sources, lateral reading and image checks, has its own post in this series. Here is the short daily version.

One study is worth knowing because it is so simple. In 2021 in Nature, Gordon Pennycook, David Rand and their co-authors reported that people often share false headlines not because they believe them but because they were not thinking about accuracy at the moment of sharing. Simply asking people to rate the accuracy of one unrelated headline improved the quality of the news they shared afterwards. So ask yourself the question before you press the button: is this true, and how would I know?

Before sharing, three checks:

• Does the headline answer its own question? In this month’s “Simpsons predicted a global blackout” rumour, 43 of 85 headlines in LSN News were unanswered questions, and only 23 said in the headline that it was false. Most of the articles debunked it in the text, which most readers never reach.
• Who is the original source? A ministry, a company, a court, a scientist, or “reports say”?
• Is there a second, independent outlet saying the same thing in different words?

Where fact-checkers fit #

My rule for LSN News is that fact-checkers are outlets like any other. They get no special weight. LSN News has 8 fact-checking outlets among its direct sources, from Spain’s Maldita.es and Germany’s CORRECTIV to Snopes, Lead Stories, FactCheck.org, Factcheck.bg, Serbia’s Istinomer and Ukraine’s StopFake. In the first week, 91% of the stories they appeared in were single-outlet stories: they mostly write about claims nobody else covers.

In the Simpsons rumour, Maldita.es was the only fact-checker in my sources to cover it, on 13 November, six days after the first article. Mainstream Brazilian outlets had called it false two days earlier. A fact-check is a useful voice. It is not a verdict, and it often arrives after the rumour has done its travelling.

What it feels like from the inside #

The first week is uncomfortable. Without alerts you feel out of the loop. Reading yesterday’s news feels slow. Then something shifts: you notice how many urgent stories resolved themselves without you, how many “everyone is reporting” stories were one article, and how often the first explanation was wrong. The anxiety drops, and so does the feeling of being pushed.

How to notice you need this #

• You learn about events from alerts before you have decided to read the news.
• You can name the headline but not the source.
• You have shared something and later found it was wrong.
• A story feels huge, and you cannot say who first reported it.
• Your news feels like a single voice, even when it comes from many sites.

Frequently asked questions #

What is information hygiene? #

A set of small daily habits that reduce your exposure to errors and manipulation: controlling when you read the news, reading from varied sources, counting independent voices and checking before you share.

What is slow news? #

Reading a story a day after it breaks instead of as it breaks. By then early claims have been confirmed or dropped and official statements are out, so you are far less likely to absorb a first, wrong explanation.

Why are question headlines a problem? #

They spread a claim without asserting it. In the Simpsons blackout rumour, 43 of 85 headlines were unanswered questions, while only 23 called the claim false in the headline.

Should I trust fact-checkers? #

Treat them like any other outlet: read their sources, note who funds them, and compare. They are often useful and sometimes late or wrong. In LSN News a fact-check counts as one voice, no more.

How much time does this take? #

About fifteen minutes a day, once the notifications are off. That is less than most people spend reacting to alerts.

The lesson #

You cannot read everything, and you do not need to. You need to choose when you read, wait until the first wrong version has been corrected, count how many people actually wrote a story, compare what different sources put first, and ask one honest question before you share. None of it requires expertise. All of it is cheaper than being moved by a headline that never meant what it seemed to say.