The internet can be a scary place. I’ve heard they let anyone on there. How can you be sure what you’re looking at is true information? How do you know if it’s a real news or research site, or just someone’s digital writing class blog? How can you be certain authors are telling the truth about themselves or their goals? How do you know what you’re reading, anyway?
Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg had those same questions. They wanted to know why “students taught traditional media literacy skills remained ‘bad at the web,’” and what the differences were “between how professional fact-checkers and others determined credibility and plausibility.” They set out to find the answers, which they helpfully published in their how-to book Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online.
In the first three chapters, Caulfield and Wineburg dispel some common myths about internet trustworthiness, and they also introduce a method for checking the credibility of a site and its information.
For instance, it matters not whether a site is a dot-com or dot-org, apparently. I had assumed there was some vetting involved in order for a site to be able to register as a dot-org, but that’s simply not the case. All it takes is fifteen bucks.
Also, rather alarmingly–but unsurprisingly–large companies (I won’t name names, but … PepsiCo, General Foods, Hershey’s, etc) tend to create and/or fund non-profits that spread information online, smoothly and snazzily, that sways readers and consumers to continue supporting those large brands. Even if it’s misinformation.
So what are readers to do?
Well, Caulfield and Wineburg present a solution: SIFT. That stands for Stop, Investigate the source, Find other coverage, and Trace the context.
Stop asks readers to just wait a second, hold on, and think for a moment. What do you know about this topic already? What do you know about the source you’re looking at? Do you know what you’re looking at? If you’re having some trouble, move on to the next step.
Investigate the source guides readers to get off the site they’re on and look up the original source elsewhere. Wikipedia is a great spot to start (no matter what your sixth grade social studies teacher told you). You may be able to find out if your source is a big-brand internet plant designed to deceive you at this step.
Find other coverage is pretty much what it sounds like. Make sure other (reputable) places are reporting the news, too. If your source is the only one, you may have cause to doubt the veracity of their claims.
Trace the context is the fun step where you get to be an investigative journalist for a second. See if you can find out where your source got its information, all the way back to the original context of their claims. You may discover they had blown some news out of proportion, or maybe your source was right all along!
Following advice like these steps has already proven helpful to me for discovering misinformation, or at least gross exaggeration, online. I personally love internet history and tracing snippets of stories, so I’m much more inclined to take the time to check this way than just reading a site’s “about” page. Hopefully you will be, too.
Comments
3 responses to “What Are You Reading, Anyway?”
You have a great attention grabber at the beginning. The internet is a scary place. The SIFT method is a game changer for navigating online info and gives us some form of advantage when diving into the internet now. It is crazy to think that a .org (sites that we were always told were trustworthy in grade school) doesn’t automatically mean a site is trustworthy. You definitely have to look closer now and get all the facts before trusting any kind of site. In a way we become detectives in order to retrieve the actual information we’re looking for or sus out the bad websites. It’s awesome that you’ve already seen benefits from using these strategies. With so much going on online, having tools like these really helps us SIFT through the chaos. I apologize for the pun at the end.
I love your laid back way of explaining this text! I actually chuckled at the “I’ve heard they let anyone there,” bit. You have done a great job of condensing their information. Some of the things that they introduced were completely new to me. I had no idea there was a stigma against ‘.coms.’ I also really enjoyed the introduction of SIFT. SIFT is a great way to dig into a website rather than relying on our own logic and reasoning skills within the article itself. It’s equal parts disappointing and yet not surprising that we have entered an era that requires a new, more involved way of using the internet. It takes a lot more effort than it used to, I feel like, but maybe that is just because I am young, and it’s always been this way.
Haha they do seem to just be letting everyone on the internet these days. I like the straight paragraph of questions you have at the beginning because I think it really illustrates just how many things there are to consider when it comes to reliability (and why the book is important). I like that you wrote about how larger companies create and fund non-profits to make themselves look better, that’s probably what stuck out most from the readings, at least to me. I also think you did a great job of summarizing the steps to SIFT in a simple and concise way.