Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

 Four Moves

What people need most when confronted with a claim that may not be 100% true is things they can do to get closer to the truth. They need something I have decided to call “moves.”

Moves accomplish intermediate goals in the fact-checking process.  They are associated with specific tactics. Here are the four moves this guide will hinge on:

  • 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: Read laterally.[1] 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.

In general, you can try these moves in sequence. If you find success at any stage, your work might be done.

When you encounter a claim you want to check, your first move might be to see if sites like Politifact, or Snopes, or even Wikipedia have researched the claim (Check for previous work).

If you can’t find previous work on the claim, start by trying to trace the claim to the source. If the claim is about research, try to find the journal it appeared in. If the claim is about an event, try to find the news publication in which it was originally reported (Go upstream).

Maybe you get lucky and the source is something known to be reputable, such as the journal Science or the newspaper the New York Times. Again, if so, you can stop there. If not, you’re going to need to read laterally, finding out more about this source you’ve ended up at and asking whether it is trustworthy (Read laterally).

And if at any point you fail–if the source you find is not trustworthy, complex questions emerge, or the claim turns out to have multiple sub-claims–then you circle back, and start a new process. Rewrite the claim. Try a new search of fact-checking sites, or find an alternate source (Circle back).

How to Use Previous Work

When fact-checking a particular claim, quote, or article, the simplest thing you can do is to see if someone has already done the work for you.

This doesn’t mean you have to accept their finding. Maybe they assign a claim “four Pinocchios,” but you would rate it three. Maybe they find the truth “mixed,” but honestly it looks “mostly false” to you.

Regardless of the finding, a reputable fact-checking site or subject wiki will have done much of the leg work for you: tracing claims to their source, identifying the owners of various sites, and linking to reputable sources for counterclaims. And that legwork, no matter what the finding, is probably worth ten times your intuition. If the claims and the evidence they present ring true to you, or if you have built up a high degree of trust in the site, then you can treat the question as closed. But even if you aren’t satisfied, you can start your work from where they left off.

Constructing a Query to Find Previous Fact-Checking

You can find previous fact-checking by using the “site” option in search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo to search known and trusted fact-checking sites for a given phrase or keyword. For example, if you see this story,

Online Article.

Figure 2

then you might use this query, which checks a couple known fact-checking sites for the keywords: obama iraqi refugee ban 2011. Let’s use the DuckDuckGo search engine to look for the keywords:

obama iraqi visa ban 2011 site:snopes.com site:politifact.com

Here are the results of our search:

Screenshot of DuckDuckGo search results. The top results are from fact-checking sites Snopes and Politifact.

Figure 3

You can see the search here. The results show that work has already been done in this area. In fact, the first result from Snopes answers our question almost fully. Remember to follow best search engine practice: scan the results and focus on the URLs and the blurbs to find the best result to click in the returned result set.

There are similar syntaxes you can use in Google, but for various reasons this particular search is easier in DuckDuckGo.

Let’s look at another claim, this time from the President. This claim is that police officer deaths increased 56 percent from 2015 to 2016. Here it is in context:

Excerpt of Trump Speech on web page.

Figure 4

Let’s ramp it up with a query that checks four different fact-checking sites:

officer deaths 2016 increased 56 percent from 2015 site:factcheck.org site:snopes.com site:politifact.com site:www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/

This gives us back a helpful array of results. The first, from the Washington Post, actually answers our question directly, but some of the others provide some helpful context as well.

Duck Duck Go search results.

Figure 5

Going to the Washington Post lets us know that this claim is, for all intents and purposes, true. We don’t need to go further, unless we want to.

Some Reputable Fact-Checking Organizations

The following organizations are generally regarded as reputable fact-checking organizations focused on U.S. national news:

Respected specialty sites cover niche areas such as climate or celebrities. Here are a few examples:

There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample:

Go Upstream to Find the Source

Our second move, after finding previous fact-checking work, is to “go upstream.”  We use this move if previous fact-checking work was insufficient for our needs.

What do we mean by “go upstream”?

Consider this claim on the conservative site the Blaze:

Headline of an online article

Figure 6

Is this claim true?

Of course we can check the credibility of this article by considering the author, the site, and when it was last revised. We’ll do some of that, eventually. But it would be ridiculous to do it on this page. Why? Because like most news pages on the web, this one provides no original information. It’s just a rewrite of an upstream page. We see the indication of that here:

Text from Daily Dot, with sentences highlighted.

Figure 7

All the information here has been collected, fact-checked (we hope!), and written up by the Daily Dot. It’s what we call “reporting on reporting.” There’s no point in evaluating the Blaze’s page.

So what do we do? Our first step is to go upstream. Go to the original story and evaluate it. When you get to the Daily Dot, then you can start asking questions about the site or the source. And it may be that for some of the information in the Daily Dot article you’d want to go a step further back and check their primary sources. But you have to start there, not here.

What “Reading Laterally” Means

Time for our third move: good fact-checkers read “laterally,” across many connected sites instead of digging deep into the site at hand.

When you start to read a book, a journal article, or a physical newspaper in the “real world,” you already know quite a bit about your source. You’ve subscribed to the newspaper, or picked it up from a newsstand because you’ve heard of it. You’ve ordered the book from Amazon or purchased it from a local bookstore because it was a book you were interested in reading. You’ve chosen a journal article either because of the quality of the journal article or because someone whose expertise and background you know cited it. In other words, when you get to the document you need to evaluate, the process of getting there has already given you some initial bearings.

Compared to these intellectual journeys, web reading is a bit more like teleportation. Even after following a source upstream, you arrive at a page, site, and author that are often all unknown to you. How do you analyze the author’s qualifications or the trustworthiness of the site?

Researchers have found that most people go about this the wrong way. When confronted with a new site, they poke around the site and try to find out what the site says about itself by going to the “about page,” clicking around in onsite author biographies, or scrolling up and down the page. This is a faulty strategy for two reasons. First, if the site is untrustworthy, then what the site says about itself is most likely untrustworthy, as well. And, even if the site is generally trustworthy, it is inclined to paint the most favorable picture of its expertise and credibility possible.

The solution to this is, in the words of Sam Wineburg’s Stanford research team, to “read laterally.” Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking.

For example, when presented with a new site that needs to be evaluated, professional fact-checkers don’t spend much time on the site itself. Instead they get off the page and see what other authoritative sources have said about the site. 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 site they’re investigating. Many of the questions they ask are the same as the vertical readers scrolling up and down the pages of the source they are evaluating. But unlike those readers, they realize that the truth is more likely to be found in the network of links to (and commentaries about) the site than in the site itself.

Only when they’ve gotten their bearings from the rest of the network do they re-engage with the content. Lateral readers gain a better understanding as to whether to trust the facts and analysis presented to them.

You can tell lateral readers at work: they have multiple tabs open and they perform web searches on the author of the piece and the ownership of the site. They also look at pages linking to the site, not just pages coming from it.

Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site’s analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site’s facts.

We’re going to deal with the latter issue of factual reliability, while noting that lateral reading is just as important for the first issue.

  1. I am indebted to researcher Sam Wineburg for this language. ↵

Adapted from: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. Authored by: Michael A. Caulfield.

License: CC 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

APA Citation

Caulfield, M. (n.d.) Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/web-strategies-for-student-fact-checkers/

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Writing and the Sciences: An Anthology Copyright © 2020 by Sara Rufner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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