Before you dive in — check out this quick explainer from the pros. It'll help make sense of everything below!
Ever come across something online that makes you pause — is it real news, an ad in disguise, or just clickbait chaos? Don’t just scroll. Start thinking like a fact-checker.
Lateral reading is the technique professional fact-checkers use to verify credibility by consulting multiple sources. Instead of digging deep into one site (vertical reading), they open new tabs and check what others are saying (lateral). This strategy was popularized by the News Literacy Project and the Stanford History Education Group.
“Good fact-checkers read laterally, across many connected sites instead of digging deep into the site at hand... They 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.”
— *Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers* / News Literacy Project
Lateral Reading Infograph: Image from News Literacy Project (let us know if you’d like to see the full visual breakdown!)
Scroll down to play Truth or Trickery — can you spot the fakes?
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For more about evaluating your sources and the CRAAP criteria, see the Evaluating Information tutorial.
