So far we've looked at simple ways to evaluate the reputation of unfamiliar sources,
but in some cases we just can't determine the reliability of the source. And most of
the time we don't really care about the source at all, we just want to get an accurate story
on the subject from somewhere. So here's a strategy. When the initial source you
encounter is low quality and you just want to find out if something is true or valid or
plausible your best option might be to find a better source for the same story or claim.
So here's an example I saw back in February. It was a claim that the Chinese government was
essentially cleaning money out of fears of the coronavirus spread. Now this is from a source
I don't recognize, so here's a simple move. Forget about this post. You actually don't
care about this source. You care about what we call the claim, the thing the post is saying
happened. So let's go and see if others are covering this now. You can type keywords into
a search engine to learn more but there's also this quick trick for copying and searching text
from the place where you're reading it. So here we can select "money is now being disinfected"
then right-click in select search now when we do that we find a ton of sites reporting this
in this case. Here at the top we see this story here which is from CNBC. We could scroll down.
There seem to be a number of other stories from a variety of news sources and if we wanted to click
into this one here we could actually just use our Wikipedia trick on this and we'd find that CNBC
is a relatively well-known business channel and in this case probably a trustworthy source for
this claim. Now notice what we didn't do here. We didn't sit around for 10 minutes thinking "does
this sound plausible?" And we didn't spend 10 minutes looking at the video and trying to
figure out was it fake or staged. Instead what we did was look to see if other people with more
expertise than us have been able to confirm this and it turned out in this case they had.
Here's another example. This time it's a claim from a Facebook group saying
that boiled garlic can be used to cure coronavirus. Now versions of this claim
have been appearing all over social media since January and we see these all the time,
right? But before we go and tell others about this alleged miracle cure, we should ask:
Are other sources reporting this? Has it been independently verified?
So let's go through the steps to figure that out. So here's our claim and we're just going
to use the same technique we were using before. We're just going to do this select and search
and again if you can't do this just open up a tab, plug the search terms in manually. This
just happens to be a shortcut that we like. Now what do we see Immediately we see an array of fact checking sites looking into this claim. The top one here factcheck is quite good but
I want to introduce you to this one down here, Snopes. Snopes is an independent fact-checking
site known for its rigorous investigations of viral claims and if we click through to
see what's Snopes says we find that Snopes has rated this "false." One thing I do want to show
you about Snopes is this is their rating, you don't have to take their word for it. If you
go down to the actual description, Snopes will link to the sources that they themselves used to
check it. So in this case here they link to some scientific evidence on that claim into the World
Health Organization's statement on that claim. You can check those links yourself if you want.
So what's the big takeaway here? Takeaway number one is probably don't try to cure coronavirus with
boiled garlic water. Takeaway number two is this that very often when news reaches us we act like
we must make a decision on that particular story or post that reaches us. But the web is abundant,
right? If it's a true story there are likely many better sources out there than the one
that happened to find you. If it's a false one maybe a reputable organization like Snopes or
factcheck has already fact checked it for you. So before sharing a story select text and search or
pop open another tab then look for a better version of the story, read, and share that.