I’m not checking things for peer review, but a lot of bullshit can be filtered out by a simple Google search. If Aunt Brenda posts a major event on Facebook, but it’s not on any news site, she probably fell for a lie.

The short answer is you don’t. Even in philosophy, a leading model of “truth” is something like “a statement is true if it’s true”. We humans are doomed to be confused and unsure.

I don’t fully believe anything I can’t test and verify myself. Thank fuck NASA left things on the moon you can ping to prove they went there and it’s easy to prove the planet isn’t flat, otherwise I’d be in trouble.

It’s peer reviewed if it has the name of a peer-reviewed journal on it. If it’s on arxiv (a pre-print server) it’s not. (Or not yet, or published on several platforms/journals.)

The main point is to be able to handle uncertainties in a normal basis, the greyness of reality, despite the temptation of blacks and whites of our minds.

For sure it costs a lot. The consideration of the superposition of possible truths and the weight of potential biases is a huge burden without granted full coverage, but allows you to accumulate a landscape of plausibility of things: yes, is not 100% precise and is still built by personal prejudices but, with a systematic acceptance of new bits of information regardless of how comfortable they are, it can grow a mostly reliable understanding of reality with a variable amount of temporary uncertainty on some facts… and you can still convert greys into quasi-b&w once they reach a decent amount of independent evidences, you now, to free a bit your RAM.

PS: Peer review is neither 100% perfect, is just more solid.

If we can agree that all “news” sites slant to the right or the left. Then you should check out the story at a few of both leaning sites.