So, we’ve gone over two habits of competent web readers.
First, they investigate the source, especially when the website or organization they land
on is unfamiliar to them.
Second, they don’t simply read the re-reporting of the re-reporting of the original reporting,
they get back to the original article that did the work, that talked to the experts,
that talked to the witnesses.
But, for lots of stories, claims, or events, you don’t even have to do that because if
you’re a fact checker, and if you build a fact checking habit, over time, you’ll
build up a library of trusted sources that you use.
And if they have done the verification work for you, you can lean on them.
Let me give you an example.
A site called FactsCan recently called to claim that the Canada Child Benefit have lifted
hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, they called it misleading.
Their reasoning, the benefit was predicted to have that affect, but we don’t know yet
whether it did.
Now, is that really misleading?
Maybe, maybe not.
But fact checking gives you a lot more than a ruling.
If you skim down this article and you can see the immense amount of work they pulled
together, they emailed the Ministry of Family, they talked to a economist.
Maybe you have a slightly different conclusion, but even if you disagree this is a great starting
point for that question.
You might want to make sure that you choose fact checking sites that are quality.
My particular go to source is Snopes, which has been in business the longest.
But the reason why you trust these sources is not that they agree with you, but that
they do this important work of verification.
Now it may seem weird that you should be relying on traditional news outfits in a course that’s
largely about the web.
But, looking for true news sources is important mostly because professional reporters are
taught fact checking as part of their work and they’re expected to do it on the stories
that they write.
Good fact checkers build this list in their head of reliable sources.
Rather than relying on the source that initially comes to them, they go out and they fetch
a higher quality source.
I call this trading up, we can show you a really simple way to do this online.
Say you find a story that it snowed in the Sahara but it’s from an untrustworthy source.
Here we see ‘Global Warming hits the Sahara’ and there’s a picture supposedly of the
Sahara covered in snow.
Now, you could trace this story to the source, but you could also just look for coverage
from a trusted source.
If you search Snow Sahara in google and then hit the news tab, you’ll see a well-researched
story from NPR, one from CNN, one from Forbes.
All confirming that this happened.
If you have a favourite fact checking site or publication, you can float that up to the
top of your search results just by typing the name after it.
So, in this case here we put the word Snopes after snow in the Sahara and we see it floats
the Snopes site to the top.
Going to the Snopes story, which you’ll find out that snow did fall in the Sahara,
but that snow actually falls in the Sahara more than you would think.
The point is you’re not wedded to using the story that came to you, it’s the internet.
You can go out and you can find a better story and invest your time in that.
And that’s it.
There are many other tricks to fact checking but if you just do these things, if you investigate
sources before you read, if you go to the original source of the reporting, if you look
at trusted work, you’re going to do so much better on the web and doing it before you
invest time in reading the article or watching a video will make sure you’re investing
your time on decent stories and also prevent you from being fooled.
So those are the tricks, those are the skills, that’s it!