Lateral Reading in Practice
Follow along as we demonstrate using SIFT (Four Moves) to evaluate a website.
Things to keep in mind:
- At this stage we’re simply doing a quick evaluation of the source. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the large amount of information on the web: the point here is not to do a detailed evaluation of every aspect of this source, but rather quickly to determine whether it appears to be trustworthy.
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Sources that you may want to give a higher level of scrutiny include: sources that use highly charged language to discuss a contentious topic; sources created by dubious organizations or individuals; and sources that are created with a commercial motive - for example, for promoting products, services, or events. If a source raises serious questions, it may be best to move on and look for other sources that you trust.) -
For this first exercise we’re using Google as our search engine. Different search engines will give you slightly different results. (In our experience Google tends to be better for getting outside sources reporting on the source you’re researching.) - To keep your device healthy (malware and virus free), don’t download files and avoid suspicious links.
CC-BY-NC-SA
This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).
Image credit: "Kaliyah Mitchell playing defense" by pennstatenews is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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