(Also see us apply our method to daily examples on our Twitter feed.)

Summary

Small habits and skills can dramatically reduce the misinformation you spread or believe.

You can learn these skills in less than an hour, and the skills can take as little as thirty seconds to use.

We’re going to teach you these skills.

If you want, you can jump to our first skill — the simple hover. Or read on for more information about our fact-checking/source-verification model

There’s a lot of bad information out there about the recent coronavirus outbreak. At the same time, just tuning out is not an option. Pandemics are serious business.

What can we do about this? How can we take advantage of the new levels of online engagement of the public with these issues while making sure that engagement is not manipulated by bad actors, or misinformed by error?

The SIFT methodology

Over the past four years, I have worked with students and faculty to identify the core skills and habits that students and citizens are missing that leave them vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation on the web. We have organized them into a model called SIFT: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

We call these “moves” and we tie each one to a couple simple skills you can usually execute in 30 seconds or less. You can learn all the moves and associated skills in less than an hour, and our work with students indicates that these skills will make a dramatic difference in your ability to sort fact from fiction on the web (and everything in between).

Stop

When you feel strong emotion, surprise, or just an irrepressible urge to share something… stop. Then use your other moves…

Investigate the Source

Find Better Coverage

Cross-check with news search

Reverse image search (Coming soon)

Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context

And

A bit more…

Want to know a (little) bit more about why SIFT works? Watch the video.

About the Author

Mike Caulfield is a digital information literacy expert working at Washington State University. He has worked with various organizations on digital literacy initiatives to combat misinformation, including AASCU’s American Democracy Project, the National Writing Project, and CIVIX Canada. He is a winner of the Rita Allen Misinformation Solutions Prize, and the author of the award-winning textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. His approach to digital critical consumption, often referred to as the “four moves”, is popular among those teaching first-year college students how to evaluate and contextualize information sources. His work has been covered by NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Times (of London).

Creation of this site was supported in part by the National Writing Project, in partnership with Washington State University Vancouver.

We’d like to expand and improve these resources. If you’re interested in contributing to this work — either with production talent, promotion, or other support — we’d love to talk to you. This is a big challenge, and we need all hands on deck.