Website Evaluation: Spotting Fake News

This infographic is based on FactCheck.org’s article, "How to Spot Fake News" (2016). Its eight easy steps can help anyone confirm the veracity of online news and websites.

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Best bets:

The Digital Polarization Initiative, spearheaded by Mike Caulfield (Washington State University Vancouver), helped students assess the credibility of open websites. I recommend his Four Moves technique for information evaluation. See Caulfield's Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, a Creative Commons Pressbooks project, for a deeper dive. Instructors, employ the five easy lessons from Check, Please!, a "starter course" to help your students fact and source-check online information.
 

More to explore:

• A Field Guide to "Fake News" and Other Information Disorders, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center
• Why Do People Fall for Fake News? by Pennycook and Rand
• Navigating the New Information Ecosystem: Helping Students Thrive in the Digital Age by Dana Dawson, Caitlin Shanley, and Stephanie Fiore

Worried about citizens' diminishing standards of information evaluation? How about the Fake News phenomenon? Why has the great promise of the internet, the so-called "information superhighway," given way to "filter bubbles" and "confirmation bias" that reinforce our pre-conceived notions of the world? Why do Facebook and Google increasingly exert monopoly power over the distribution and consumption of online information? Find some answers by listening to The Failed Promise of the Internet, an NPR podcast aired February 3, 2017.

To avoid the "walled garden" effect, obtain at least some of your news from content creators directly. Curate a mix of credible, authoritative news sites that represent a range of political perspectives. I recommend KCRW's Left, Right, and Center podcast and the Read Across the Aisle app for iOS and Chrome. Follow on X (Twitter) not only the commentators with whom you agree, but also one or two with whom you disagree. If, for example, your political beliefs lean left, follow David Brooks (NYT), National Review, and/or The Bulwark. Conversely, conservatives might follow Gail Collins (NYT), The Atlantic, and/or Mother Jones. Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable by sampling credible sources of information that do not conform with your own beliefs or ideological framework.

Reference & User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), a high-impact journal in library and information science, published this feature article authored by Dr. Lisa Rose-Wiles, Science Librarian/Associate Professor, Seton Hall University. The article appeared in a special issue titled Trusted Information in an Age of Uncertainty (57.3, 2018). In it, Rose-Wiles "reflect[s] on the difficulties of persuading students to persist in using library resources and the use of Bernard Lonergan's generalized empirical method as a framework for critical thinking and information literacy."