Mike Caulfield and Kristin Conlin
Good fact-checkers read laterally, across many connected sites instead of digging deep into the site at hand.
When you start to read a book, a journal article, or a physical newspaper, you already know quite a bit about your source. You subscribed to the newspaper, or picked it up from a newsstand because you recognize the name. You ordered the book or purchased it from a local bookstore because it was a book you were interested in reading or it was recommended to you based on your interests. In other words, when you get to the document you need to evaluate, the process of getting there has already given you some initial bearings.
The breadcrumbs of information described above is different from web reading which is more like teleportation. Even after following a source upstream, you arrive at a page, site, and author that are often all unknown to you. How do you analyze the author’s qualifications or the trustworthiness of the site?
Researchers have found that most people go about this the wrong way. When confronted with a new site, they poke around the site and try to find out what the site says about itself by going to the “about page,” clicking around in onsite author biographies, or scrolling up and down the page. This is a faulty strategy for two reasons:
- First, if the site is untrustworthy, then what the site says about itself is most likely untrustworthy, as well.
- Even if the site is generally trustworthy, it is inclined to paint the most favorable picture of its expertise and credibility possible.
The solution to this is, in the words of Sam Wineburg’s Stanford research team, to read laterally. Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking.
Only when they’ve gotten their bearings from the rest of the network do they re-engage with the content. Lateral readers gain a better understanding as to whether to trust the facts and analysis presented to them.
You can tell lateral readers at work:
- They have multiple tabs open.
- They perform web searches on the author of the piece and the ownership of the site.
- They also look at pages linking to the site, not just pages coming from it.
Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site’s analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site’s facts.
We’re going to deal with the latter issue of factual reliability, while noting that lateral reading is just as important for the first issue.
- Stanford History Education Group (2020 Jan 16) Sort Fact from Fiction Online with Lateral Reading [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/SHNprb2hgzU ↵
Move away from source page and investigate what other authoritative sources have said about the site. Researchers who read laterally open up many tabs in their browser, piecing together different bits of information from across the web to get a better picture of the site they're investigating.
Many of the questions they ask are the same as the vertical readers scrolling up and down the pages of the source they are evaluating.
Unlike those readers, lateral readers realize that the truth is more likely to be found in the network of links to (and commentaries about) the site than in the site itself.
