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You're lazing around the living room after a big holiday meal, when your uncle starts flipping through vertical videos. "Did you see that one of the cat snatching that snake out of a dude's bed?" he asks.

Is it real? Is it fake? You feel a headache coming on.

"We're being overrun by slop," said Mike Caulfield, a co-author of the book Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online . "It just floods the zone and at some point your mental faculties are just exhausted."

But Caulfield and other experts say you don't need to give in to despair, at least not yet. There are a few simple dos and don'ts you can use to try and evaluate the authenticity of what you see online.

Don't assume everything is fake

With so much slop

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