Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Fact checkers do something special to sift through online information. It's simple and effective. But most of us don't do it.
Join my online learning community: benjaminkeep.com/community
00:00 Introduction
00:18 What we do.
01:01 What people rely on for reliability.
02:38 What fact checkers do that’s different.
03:32 Which organization is legit?
REFERENCES
The technical term for what I'm talking about here is "lateral reading," which means moving across sources to compare them (rather than just within a source - "vertical reading").
The paper below is a readable intro to this line of research.
McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The Challenge That's Bigger than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. American educator, 41(3), 4. (files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1156387.pdf)
This one discusses a large-scale experiment on high schoolers asking them to evaluate co2science.org, among other things. Students who left the website did far better than those doing a “close reading”.
Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 0013189X211017495. (https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cz440cm8408/Students%27%20Civic%20Online%20Reasoning_2021.pdf)
The Reboot Foundation also did a partial replication of some of the findings above for both young and older adults:
reboot-foundation.org/is-there-a-fake-news-generation
Fact checkers do something special to sift through online information. It's simple and effective. But most of us don't do it.
Join my online learning community: benjaminkeep.com/community
00:00 Introduction
00:18 What we do.
01:01 What people rely on for reliability.
02:38 What fact checkers do that’s different.
03:32 Which organization is legit?
REFERENCES
The technical term for what I'm talking about here is "lateral reading," which means moving across sources to compare them (rather than just within a source - "vertical reading").
The paper below is a readable intro to this line of research.
McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The Challenge That's Bigger than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. American educator, 41(3), 4. (files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1156387.pdf)
This one discusses a large-scale experiment on high schoolers asking them to evaluate co2science.org, among other things. Students who left the website did far better than those doing a “close reading”.
Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 0013189X211017495. (https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cz440cm8408/Students%27%20Civic%20Online%20Reasoning_2021.pdf)
The Reboot Foundation also did a partial replication of some of the findings above for both young and older adults:
reboot-foundation.org/is-there-a-fake-news-generation
