As we will be learning about evaluating sources, let’s start with an activity to test your ability to sort fact from fiction. Read each of the following four scenarios and determine whether the statement is true or false. It’s not always easy to tell the difference. Go ahead and guess if you’re not sure—we’ll learn techniques for sorting fact from fiction later on. Good luck!

The SIFT Method

Figure 1. Following the SIFT method can help you quickly and confidently evaluate sources online.

No matter how you did on the pretest, you probably found some of the questions tricky. It’s not always clear what is true or false and what sources of information are trustworthy. The SIFT method is a tool to help you better evaluate sources you find online. It is designed to help you with making quick judgments about information—just stopping when you read things like news articles or social media posts to ask yourself, “Does this seem questionable? Can I verify if this is accurate information?” These kinds of quick-assessment skills are also helpful to deeper research, as you want to make sure that you are looking at trustworthy and scholarly sources of information when conducting historical research or making claims about historical events. The four steps of the SIFT method are to: stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims.

STOP

The first task is the simplest. STOP reminds you of two things.

First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. Don’t take it as fact or share media until you know what it is.

Second, when you want to verify information online, it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose. 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 are doing deep research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and independently verify them.

Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. Being able to quickly look at the website or source of information to determine if the information is likely credible or not will help you determine if you should continue reading the information or move on. There are several ways to quickly determine that a website is fake.