How to Be Your Own Fact Checker

AS SOCIAL MEDIA platforms abandon fact-checking and long-established news sources suffer under financial duress, it’s harder and harder to know how to trust what we read online.

That’s why Sarah McGrew, assistant professor in UMD’s Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, is educating middle and high school students (and adults) on how to be their own fact checkers. “The best approach is to force ourselves to think consistently about where information is coming from, and to try to investigate unfamiliar sources in efficient, effective ways,” she says.

Here are some of her tips to spot fact and fiction.

McGrew suggests a strategy known she calls lateral reading: When you see an article from an unfamiliar source, open a new browser tab to read up on that website. Wikipedia and its references are a great starting place, she says.

Scan the displayed snippets of text, examine URLs and read through several of the results, says McGrew.

Fact-checking sites like the Poynter Institute’s Politifact.com and the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Factcheck.org are “staffed by folks who are trained in journalism,” says McGrew. Legacy newspapers and magazines are also largely reliable—and, importantly, acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. “There are no perfect, completely credible-all-the-time sources, but we have to trust something.”

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer “a great diversity of voices and opinions that can be hard to come by if we rely on traditional media, or people in our day-to-day lives,” says McGrew. Use them to organize gatherings or civic action—but be a critical consumer of claims made there.