My main trick is simply to know a lot of really smart people in various fields.
Don Knuth smirked and said (paraphrased from memory): "I'm x years in the field, you can bet I made a few friends along that I can ask."
Social media posts, both-sidesism (aka the false middle), people claiming to live in a place where some event happened (or did not...) doesn't move the needle factwise. It's all just different degrees of hearsay and that does tend to converge on 'what you agree with'.