A few days ago, without so much as a flinch in his sagging jowls, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared "Russia has no plans to attack other countries, we have not even attacked Ukraine". A barefaced lie.

Days before, a video showing actors having blood makeup smeared on their faces on a film set was shared as supposed evidence of the Ukraine war being a hoax, with "crisis actors" depicting the wounded. It went viral on social media.

Yes, it's war propaganda, but misinformation flourishes beyond the battlefield. Since 2020, false stories about COVID-19 have similarly polluted the information ecosystem: that the vaccine kills children, that 5G causes the disease, that ivermectin is the answer, or that the pandemic is a government conspiracy to control people.

In Australia, a fresh wave of false information is likely to hit social media with an awesome fury as campaigning for the federal election unfolds. Digital platforms are an integral part of life for most Australians, and this is where information will be lapped up and spread about, accurate or not, through the use of the ubiquitous share button.

The world we live in

Every month, 17.3 million Australians access Facebook and 11.2 million access Instagram, according to the ACCC's 2019 Digital Platforms Report. In a population of 25 million, 21 million of whom are over the age of 13, just a few words of misinformation can have a colossal impact.

This is the world we live in. False narratives, emotive content and questionable claims spread with stunning velocity on social media, creating a miasma of misinformation that most people think they can see through, but frequently can't, because they lead busy lives and don't have the time to double check everything, or even anything.

That doesn't mean we empty-headedly believe everything we read, from QAnon conspiracies to vaccine denialism.

It's not just fringe elements, nefarious state actors and bots spreading bad information. Even Australian MPs shamelessly promulgate misinformation using social media.

United Australia Party leader Craig Kelly's Facebook and Instagram accounts were banned last year for breaching the platforms' misinformation policy over posts promoting unproven Covid-19 treatments. Nationals MP George Christensen last week falsely claimed "power elites and the media" were concealing a sudden rise in deaths among Australians vaccinated against COVID-19.

The shifting sands of information sources

Canberra University's 2021 Digital News Report paints an interesting picture: Fewer Australians are interested in news and there is a gradual shift away from traditional news platforms towards online and social media news sources.

An online survey of more than 2,000 respondents found 64 per cent were very or extremely interested in news in 2016. That fell to 52 per cent last year.

About a quarter (23 per cent) of news consumers primarily used social media for news in 2021, up five percentage points from 2019.

We're in our own bubbles of information — that's our Twitter community, Facebook group or Whatsapp tribe — sharing, laughing at and seething over bits of information, often without any idea of their provenance.

And when we need reliable, accurate and trustworthy information (like when we need to know how long to wait before getting a vaccine booster or the side effects on kids), we wade though an ocean of text looking for it. When we either can't find it, or we're not sure whether what we have found is, in fact, a reliable source, we throw our hands in the air and cry:

Disappointingly, many people don't know what fact checking entails. Few Australian journalists cite the work of local fact checkers.

Essentially, fact checking is an offshoot of journalism that has emerged in response to the global rise of so-called fake news and perceptions that conventional journalism is unable to challenge untruthful political claims.

Worldwide, there are more than 300 fact-checking organisations operating in at least 102 countries, according to the Duke Reporters' Lab in the US. Three of them are based in Australia: RMIT ABC Fact Check, RMIT FactLab and AAP FactCheck.

Fact checking misinformation on Meta

RMIT FactLab, the newest of the three, is set to start debunking and verifying misinformation on social media in the lead up to the federal election. As a third-party fact-checking partner with Meta, it is one of more than 80 fact-checking organisations worldwide that will review viral misinformation on the tech giant's platforms, Facebook and Instagram.

Posts containing potential misinformation flagged by users as well as Meta's own algorithms are referred to RMIT FactLab, which will review and rate the accuracy of content before publishing the findings on its site.

Facebook and Instagram users who share or are about to share content that has been debunked will be alerted to the fact check article, and any content rated as false will feature less prominently in people's feeds, thereby limiting its spread.

RMIT FactLab also works alongside RMIT ABC Fact Check, a partnership between RMIT University and the ABC, which focuses specifically on checking the accuracy of claims made by public figures, mainly politicians.

This doesn't mean the end of misinformation in Australia. Fact checkers are not superheroes saving the world.

But fact checking is an indispensable tool for injecting accurate, reliable information into the public domain.

It also combats false beliefs in the community and informs robust public debate in the face of declining trust in institutions such as governments and media.

Over the coming weeks and beyond, people will assess what the political parties stand for and what their promises will mean for their lives.

For a healthy, vibrant democracy to thrive, it's imperative that everyone has access to accurate, reliable and trustworthy information before they pick up their pencil at the ballot box.

Sushi Das is chief of staff at RMIT ABC Fact Check and a PhD candidate researching fact checking.