Educational Administration

The Internet allows people to create and to share information in ways that once seemed possible only in science fiction. At the same time that we can benefit from the open nature of the Internet, it's sometimes hard to decide what online information to trust and to use.

We'll offer some simple, evidence-based strategies for evaluating the credibility of online sources, as well as reading critically. More specifically, we’ll teach you about “lateral reading,” the practice of doing a quick initial evaluation of a website by spending little time on the website and more time reading what others say about the source or related issue. Lateral reading is used commonly by fact checkers.

These strategies will help you look beyond less important surface features of a web source (for example, how professional it looks or if it's a .org), and think more carefully about who is behind the source, what their purpose is, and how trustworthy and credible they are. 

On this page we’ll introduce you to several lateral reading strategies and concepts.

Misinformation on COVID-19: There is a lot of misinformation circulating about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus. University of Toronto Libraries offers helpful tips on spotting such information. Many of those strategies are similar to the broader strategies presented in this guide.  

This guide draws largely on research from the Stanford History Education Group and on teaching materials from Mike Caulfield's SIFT approach and his Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.

Image credit: “200 pair telephone cable model of corpus callosum.” By brewbooks. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Click restraint: a regular practice of fact checkers, through which one reviews and analyzes a list of search results before deciding on which links to click

One important part of lateral reading is click restraint. When you practice click restraint, you don’t immediately click on the first search results. Instead you scan a search results page, looking at things like the title, source description, and featured sections, before deciding what sources to examine. This helps you to get a fuller picture of the coverage available on that source, as well as to look for sources that don’t come from the original source. 

Fact checkers exercise click restraint: they recognize that some sources may not be the most reliable ones and look for trusted coverage. Doing this will help you avoid “rabbit holes” and misleading information. Considering the results page as a whole can also give you insight into the source. For example, if many of the sources appear to be highly partisan or emotionally charged, the original source may be about a polarizing issue, or the source itself may be polarizing. 

This short video from the Stanford History Education Group illustrates the importance of click restraint and why you shouldn’t assume that the first search results are necessarily the most reliable or relevant ones. 

Video: How to Find Better Information Online: Click Restraint