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Fake News and Alternative Facts: Finding Accurate News: The SIFT Method

This guide for students, faculty and staff investigates the phenomenon of fake news, and provides proactive strategies to help them recognize fake news, and identify accurate sources.

Why SIFT?

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)

 

Journalism Code of Ethics

Real news is written by real journalists who adhere to a code of ethics for reporting. One way to ensure that you get accurate news is to make sure your news is written by professional journalists rather than content creators from the general public. When in doubt about an author, Google them and find out more.

The Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics outlines that journalists should:

  • Seek truth and report it
  • Minimize harm
  • Act independently
  • Be accountable and transparent

For a full description click here: SPJ Code of Ethics

Fact-Checking Websites

SIFT to find Quality Sources Online

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Reverse Image Search 

If you have questions about veracity of an image or video you can use Google Image Search (images.google.com). 

1. Grab the URL for the photo that you are curious about, or download it to your computer. If using Google Chrome browser, you can right click and select "Search Google for Image"

2. Go to Google Images and click on the Camera Icon.

Google images search with camera icon circled

3. Paste the URL or upload your image.

Google images with search by image menu activated

4. See the results to find the original source, or what the web is saying about the images. This can also be done with screenshots from videos.

SIFT method was developed by Mike Caulfield based on the skills used by professionals used by fact-checkers

SIFT Video Playlist

Faculty Librarian

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Jeremy Donald
Contact:
Faculty Librarian/Associate Professor
Northridge Campus Library Rm 1220.1
11928 Stonehollow Dr.
Austin, TX 78758
jeremy.donald@austincc.edu
512-223-4742

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