41 Choosing Credible Web Sources: Fact-checking

When you find a source of information, how do you know if it’s true? How can you be sure that it is a reliable, trustworthy, and effective piece of evidence for your research? This chapter will introduce you to a set of strategies to quickly and effectively verify your sources, based on the approach taken by professional fact-checkers. Fact-checking can minimize your own susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation and help you to avoid spreading it to others.

What Fact-Checkers Do

As an introduction, please watch the following videos, which discuss the results of an interesting study [New Tab] of Stanford students, historians, and professional fact-checkers (Wineburg and McGrew, 2019). Which group do you think did the best job of identifying reliable sources?

Read Laterally

When investigating a source, fact-checkers read “laterally” across many websites, rather than digging deep (reading “vertically”) into the one source they are evaluating. That is, they don’t spend much time on the source itself, but instead, they quickly get off the page and see what others have said about the source. They open up many tabs in their browser, piecing together different bits of information from across the web to get a better picture of the source they’re investigating.

Please watch the following short video [2:44] for a demonstration of this strategy. Pay particular attention to how Wikipedia can be used to quickly get useful information about publications, organizations, and authors.

Find Better Coverage

What if the source you find is low-quality, or you can’t determine if it is reliable or not? Perhaps you don’t really care about the source—you care about the claim that source is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement. A common example of this is a meme you might encounter on social media. The random person or group who posted the meme may be less important than the quote or claim the meme makes.

Your best strategy in this case might actually be to find a better source altogether, to look for other coverage that includes trusted reporting or analysis on that same claim. Rather than relying on the source that you initially found, you can trade up for a higher-quality source.

The point is that you’re not wedded to using that initial source. We have the internet! You can go out and find a better source and invest your time there. Please watch this video [4:10] that demonstrates this strategy and notes how fact-checkers build a library of trusted sources they can rely on to provide better coverage.

Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video, and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real, but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding—but you’re not certain if the cited research paper actually said that. The people who re-report these stories either get things wrong by mistake, or, in some cases, they are intentionally misleading us.

In these cases, you will want to trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in its original context and get a sense of whether the version you saw was accurately presented. Please watch the following video [1:33] that discusses re-reporting vs. original reporting and demonstrates a quick tip: going “upstream” to find the original reporting source.

Image Descriptions

Fig. 41.1 Image Description. The image displays four yellow icons evenly spaced against a dark background. From left to right: The first icon is an octagonal shape with a white hand in the center, symbolizing a stop or caution sign. The second icon resembles a speech bubble, with an absence of internal designs, suggesting communication or dialogue. The third icon is a simplified, abstract shape with no specific identifiable features, possibly representing a unique concept. The fourth icon resembles an abstract face. Each icon is distinct in shape and design, emphasizing different conceptual ideas. [Return to Fig. 41.1]