Researchers at the Digital Inquiry Group discovered that students aren't great at knowing how to find out if facts are fake. Then they studied trained historians and found out they weren't great at it either - except within their own field. Who was fastest at spotting inaccuracies and misinformation? Fact-checkers. They have developed some shortcuts that are useful for all of us to know. One of the most important is to read laterally - check some basics by consulting other sources before you spend a lot of time buying into an argument.
Mike Caulfield has written free textbook on how to check facts. In a nutshell, here are four things you can do to become better at distinguishing what is factually true. You may not have to do all four moves - you may find out in the very first step that someone reputable has already determined something is true or false, and then you're done.
- Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.
- Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information.
- Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
- Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.
News outlets hire professional fact-checkers. When a fact-checker goes to work, it looks like this:
This example comes from ProPublic Illinois, a non-profit organization that does investigative journalism. Clearly, it's not possible for people to do this much work for every fact that they encounter in daily life. But it demonstrates that sources that have a good reputation have earned it by upholding standards. In journalism, this takes the form of careful fact-checking and issuing corrections. In scientific and scholarly writing, it comes in the form of peer review. When you find reliable sources, you don't have to do all that work yourself.
Slightly abridged from Chapter Five of Mike Caulfield's Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.
The following organizations are generally regarded as reputable fact-checking organizations focused on U.S. national news:
Respected specialty sites cover areas such as climate. Here are a few examples:
In addition, Wikipedia can be a good source for fact-checking. A good Wikipedia article is heavily sourced. You may sometimes see warnings that an article needs more citations or or disputed.
You can also click on the "talk" tab to see if there were arguments about the validity of a source what belongs in the article going on behind the scenes.
