It was the best of sources, it was the worst of sources...
The Internet is a fantastic place to find great sources, but it's also a fantastic place to find not so great sources.
Learning how to evaluate information is one of the most important skills you will learn at ACC. Anyone can publish on the web - you have to be proactive about deciding if the information is reliable or contains bad information.
Tips:
For more information about evaluating your sources and using both the CRAAP and SIFT criteria, see the Evaluating Information tutorial.l.
Use the SIFT skills employed by many fact checkers to determine if a news source or claim is factual and trustworthy. Simply put the SIFT skills are:
| S |
Stop! Do NOT read the source you just found, instead: |
| I |
Investigate the source. Use Google, Fact Checking Websites and/or Wikipedia to find out more about the source of information. Good fact checking websites include, Snopes.com and AP Fact Checker. |
| F |
Find the original source. If the source you found seems to be quoting from another article or other source, find the original source of information to confirm facts and investigate the original source. |
| T |
Look for Trusted sources. Build a library in your mind of sources you have found to be trustworthy. When you see a claim online, you can Google the claim and add the name of one of your trusted sources to see if they have covered the same story. Fact checking websites like Snopes are great sources of trustworthy information because of the amount of research they do to verify a story. |
Online content is optimized with powerful algorithms and crowd-tested designs to appeal to your emotions and to seem legitimate. Fake news can appear to be current, compelling, accurate, credible, and well-intentioned--and still be fake. Its goals are often to create a subjective sense of urgency, to plant an idea in your head, and to get you to repost and share with your network.
It can be difficult if not impossible to recognize fake news as such by comparing it to a list of criteria. For example, if we are not familiar with a source's particular claim, it is not easy to determine the accuracy of that claim simply by assessing the qualities of the source itself.
Fact-checking with lateral reading is an easy way to verify claims and establish credible sources. "...In a 2017 working paper, Wineburg and his colleague Sarah McGrew studied the fact-checking process of 10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact-checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduate students. They found that the professional fact-checkers were about twice as successful as historians at evaluating the trustworthiness of two different online sources on school bullying, and five times more successful than students." (Timsit, 2019)