I knew I wanted to set out and craft a set of (somewhat) comprehensive recommendations for helping media users in my generation, Some of the most enjoyable moments when engaging with the curriculum established for this class was the games, lectures, readings and exercises directly related to evaluating questionable information and evaluating the legitimacy and trustworthiness of a variety of news sources.
Being a journalism student with a desire to work in digital journalism as a writer and editor, I think this was incredibly valuable to think about as a topic needing to be addressed within academic spaces. Working for a student media organization has also helped me recognize the vital importance of journalists fact-checking any and all information they engage with before sharing it to a broader audience. Even sharing a satirical tweet can not only confuse your broader social following and contribute to the omnipresence of misinformation, but it can damage your reputation as a reporter.
I also engage with a wide range of news organizations on a regular basis, reading stories on breaking local news, thoughtful profiles, national investigations and celebrity gossip from a certain revamped “website on the internet.” Evaluating information I digest on a habitual basis varies from publication-to-publication, and while many times I find it to be easy, at times I’m stumped.
This course has helped me immensely by providing me with a list of tools I employ when I need to verify information before sharing it, and I wanted to narrow down some of the most effective ones I’ve come across for my intended audience.
The intended audience of this post is frequent social media and news media consumers, more specifically consumers who hope to work in media and need to be cautious of spreading misleading or decontextualized information, who are between the ages of 17 and 24.
I wanted to focus on this specific subset of news and social media consumers because we have essentially grown up in a political and social landscape that inundates us with digital content at every turn. Since our adolescence we have been intimately acquainted with the nuances and toxic complexities of the internet, and we have aged into a period in history where technology is concretely enmeshed with our realities.
There’s no escaping the circular life of content in our young adulthood; we rely on the internet to survive and vice versa. I think working through a written medium is one of the more accessible ways to reach this audience because it allows us to strip away the tendencies and habits we take up when producing audio visual content for a social platform. With writing, the focus remains on the message rather than on the delivery.
The first essential tip for verifying information online before sharing it is to read laterally. Lateral reading is the action of leaving a website where you read a piece of questionable information and looking for external sources that confirm the information. I have found lateral reading to be crucial in my editing positions at The State Press, ASU’s student news organization.
Oftentimes, reporters will comment a link to a source for information they include in a draft, and it does not meet my expectations or I am left with more questions than I started with. This is when lateral reading comes into play. Here’s a video that offers a crash course in lateral reading.
The second essential tip I want to offer for vetting information you encounter online is utilizing the power of Wikipedia. Despite being the infamously disavowed source for information for high school essays, this free, publicly edited digital encyclopedia is extraordinarily useful in evaluating information you find online — and it’s becoming more and more helpful in evaluating the trustworthiness of smaller news organizations.
In one of the CTRL + F videos from this class, Mike Caulfield notes how Wikipedia can contextualize information found in a news article by helping you assess the pipe it’s coming from. While we can’t draw concrete conclusions on the trustworthiness of a news source from a Wikipedia search online, the aggregated information on Wikipedia — which has a rigid citation policy — is extremely helpful in discerning whether you should be skeptical of the claims you encounter when perusing the given website.
The citations themselves can also lead you to trust or distrust any given news organization or claim, as they offer you context for the Wikipedia entry directly from a primary or secondary source.
The third essential tip I want my audience to employ when they’re interrogating the truthfulness of various information online is to use the SIFT method of looking at sources and information. This goes along with the first two points I provided, particularly the method of lateral reading, but I think the SIFT method offers a good approach to vetting questionable information you see online. SIFT stands for Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.
Asking yourself what the source of the questionable information has to gain by presenting and spreading the information at hand is a good first step when applying the SIFT method to your media consumption. Then, navigating to other sources who can confirm or deny the information you’ve tasked yourself with investigating can help you assess whether you’re being duped or not.
Asking yourself if a photo that makes you particularly emotional or seems too good to be true is doctored, and then looking at where the information came from, is super helpful in training yourself to check if information you are presented with is true.
Overall, these three tips — reading laterally, utilizing the power of Wikipedia, and employing the SIFT method in your day-to-day media consumption — can really help you in your quest for finding the truth amid the slew of decontextualized, misleading information you’ve got to navigate constantly.
In our current political and social landscape, where information spreads faster than we’ve ever imagined and false narratives can spread like wildfire, it’s important to have comprehensive and concrete tools on hand when you’re met with information that appears to be false or fantastical.
This is especially true for younger individuals who have a desire to work in media at some point in their lives. We’re not only engaging with a high level of journalistic content on a daily basis, but we’re tasked with sharing it with others in efforts to solidify a kind of journalistic brand.
Making sure you aren’t accidentally (or purposefully, for that matter) sharing false information with your social media following is extremely important in our highly polarized world. I hope these tools offer you some guidance on how I tend to approach questionable content or publications, thank you for reading!
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