In this module, we'll shift our focus from navigating, narrowing, and selecting from search results and focus on how to evaluate online content—including the websites you select from search results. You'll be introduced to the factors that make something reliable and practice strategies for investigating the reliability of online content.
After completing this module, you should be able to:
When you arrive at a website or online post that you've never seen before, how should you decide whether to trust it? To find out, researchers studied how professional fact checkers evaluated unfamiliar online content. What did these fact checkers pay attention to in order to successfully evaluate information?
The fact checkers consistently asked, and tried to answer, three questions as they evaluated online information:
In the next few pages, we're going to focus on the first question—Who's behind this information?—because it's so important to prioritize when evaluating digital content. Information is always produced by somebody, somewhere, and figuring out who that person (or organization) is, what they care about, and why they might have produced that information is a critical first step in deciding whether it is trustworthy. You'll be introduced to a strategy for investigating who is behind information, lateral reading, and consider what features of a source are most important to investigate while reading laterally.
