1. Fact checking on the web
Kirsten Hansen
Created for: Pitzer FYS Contesting Science
NB: All of the material on slide 3 and after is from Mike Caulfield’s excellent online textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. It can be accessed at and I highly recommend checking it out for further details on the four steps for fast and frugal fact checking.

2. From news article to research article
Get as much information as you can from the news article. Do you have enough to find the original research article? No
Yes
Check laterally for other news articles about the original news article OR the research article. Once you find them, look for information to help find the original research article.
Find the full text of the research article by searching for the title of the article (or author’s name and journal title) in advanced Library Search.

3. Fast and frugal fact-checking
Be a good internet citizen- fact-check before sharing
4 strategies
Check for previous work
Go upstream to the source
Read laterally
Circle back
And a word of advice: Check your emotions
If at any point, the strategy works, stop searching!
These strategies come from Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers online textbook.

4. Check for previous work
Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.
There are lots of reputable fact-checking organizations.
The following organizations are generally regarded as reputable fact-checking organizations focused on U.S. national news:
Politifact
Factcheck.org
Washington Post Fact Checker
Snopes
Truth be Told
NPR Fact-Check
Lie Detector (Univision, Spanish language)
Hoax Slayer
Respected specialty sites cover niche areas such as climate or celebrities. Here are a few examples:
Climate Feedback
SciCheck
Quote Investigator
There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample:
FactsCan (Canada)
TrudeauMetre (Canada)
El Polígrafo (Mexico)
The Hound (Mexico)
Guardian Reality Check (UK)
BBC Reality Check (UK)
Channel 4 Fact Check (UK)
Full Fact (UK)
tracks retractions of scientific papers and pulls retractions from multiple journals together into a single website.

5. Go upstream
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.
Many newspapers include content from the Associated Press or Reuters news agencies. To evaluate those claims, backtrack to the original reporting source.
Pay particular attention to sponsored content, which can be very sneaky!
Going upstream is particularly important for viral content, which spreads fast and can be hard to verify (photos in particular!)*
*Caulfield has excellent strategies for tracking photos in the Web Literacy textbook.
Activity: Rank the following news sources on how much sponsored content you believe their pages will feature: CNN, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, HuffPost, Brietbart, New York Times.
Individually, or in groups, visit the following pages and list all sponsored content you see, tallying up the total amount on each page. Then rank the sites from most sponsored content to least.
After you’ve ranked the websites, answer these questions:
Did the ranking surprise you at all?
What do you think the quantity of sponsored content indicates about a website?
How does this change your perspective on these websites’ reliability?
Why would some websites have more sponsored content than others?

6. Read laterally
Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.).
Google it! (And Wikipedia it.)
Google and Wikipedia can tell you a lot about a source’s reputation and general biases.
Over time, you’ll build up a mental model of various sources and their reputations.
In class, we used Wikipedia to check on the Daily Mail and learned that it has a reputation for misleading reporting on science and medicine.
Activity:
Evaluate the reputations of the following sites by “reading laterally.” Answer the following questions to determine the reputability of each site: Who runs them? To what purpose? What is their history of accuracy, and how do they rate on process, aim, and expertise?

7. 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.
When you get stuck thing about: Whose expertise on this topic would you trust?
For example, when I have questions about health information, I trust the NIH (National Institute of Health) and the Mayo Clinic.
When there is breaking news, I tend to trust NPR as well as the Associated Press and Reuters. I know that Al Jazeera is a reputable news organization that often provides a non-US perspective.
Don’t fall into the trap of never believing anything- keep a critical mind, but also recognize that there are reputable people in many different fields with real expertise, and search them out.

8. What else would you add? From class: Watch out for confirmation bias!
If it’s a real news story, multiple news outlets will be reporting on it. If only one site is reporting a breaking news story or repeating a claim, be cautious