3.3 A Fact Checking Habit

Web literacy generally asks us to look at web pages and think about them critically this includes evaluating the information that reaches us through social media sites. For these daily tasks, we need concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources.

Building a Fact-Checking Habit by Checking Your Emotions

In addition to this method, here is one more word of advice: Check your emotions.

The habit is simple. When you feel strong emotions—happiness, anger, pride, vindication—and that emotion pushes you to share a “fact” with others, stop. Above all, these are the claims that you must fact-check.

Why? Because you’re already likely to check things you know are important to get right, and you’re predisposed to analyze things that put you in an intellectual frame of mind. But things that make you angry or overjoyed could cause you to act impulsively.

Our normal inclination is to ignore verification needs when we react strongly to content, and researchers have found that content that causes strong emotions (both positive and negative) spreads the fastest through our social networks. Savvy activists and advocates take advantage of this flaw of ours, getting past our filters by posting material that goes straight to our hearts.

Use your emotions as a reminder. Strong emotions should become a trigger for your new fact-checking habit. Every time content you want to share makes you feel rage, laughter, ridicule, or even a heartwarming buzz, spend thirty seconds fact-checking. It will do you well.

It’s about Recontextualizing

There’s a theme that runs through what we’ve gone over with information literacy: it’s about getting the necessary context to read, view, or listen effectively. And doing that first.

One piece of context is who the speaker or publisher is. What’s their expertise? What’s their agenda? What’s their record of fairness or accuracy? So we investigate the source. When you hear a rumor, you should know who the source is before reacting to it; similarly, when you encounter something on the web, you need the same sort of context.

When it comes to claims, a key piece of context includes whether they are broadly accepted or rejected or something in between. By scanning for other coverage, you can see the expert consensus on a claim, learn the history around it, and ultimately land on a better source.

Finally, when evidence is presented with a certain frame—whether a quote, a video, or a scientific finding—sometimes it helps to reconstruct the original context in which the photo was taken or the research claim was made. It can look quite different in context!

In some cases, these techniques will show you claims are outright wrong or that sources are legitimately “bad actors” who are trying to deceive you. But even when the material is not intentionally deceptive, the moves do something just as important: they reestablish the context that the web so often strips away, allowing for more fruitful engagement with all digital information.