There’s a theme that runs through all of these moves: they are about reconstructing the necessary context to read, view, or listen to digital content effectively. In these cases we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in it’s original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding - but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.
But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context In lesson two we’ll show you some techniques to do this sort of thing very quickly.ĭo you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs - more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied. If you get an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement. You care about the claim the article is making. Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t be trusted. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. But idea here is that you want to know what you’re reading before you read it. We’ll go into this move more on the next page. But in either case, stopping periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key. We get quicker with the simple stuff in part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. If you are doing deep research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and independently verify them. If you just want to repost, read an interesting story, or get a high-level explanation of a concept, it’s probably good enough to find out whether the publication is reputable. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose.
Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. STOP reminds you of two things.įirst, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it - STOP. We call the “things to do” moves and there are four of them: The four moves: Stop, Investigate the source, find better coverage, trace the original context. Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. Since 2017, we’ve been teaching students with something called the Four Moves. How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding clickbait?