I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.
I'm thinking about the argument I got caught in yesterday- the subject of it doesn't matter.
Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the 'I encourage you to do your own research' statements real obnoxious. If it's phrased in a way that's impossible to navigate, good luck.
It sucks, but you gotta.
If you don't want to fact check individual words, that's fine. That's a lot to ask of someone that's just trying to figure out whether something is true.
This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.' Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.
This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.
Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.
If you're not sure about something, question it.
I feel like I've been throwing this around a LOT lately, but:
Practice SIFT! SIFT is based on lateral research and can be very helpful for these situations.
DON'T just share information without doing your due diligence.
whyyy the fuck does this not have more notes please rb this more often qwq
Well, I mean... probably because I posted it like an hour ago.
STOP
i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it
INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE
zetabrarian's blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source -- anyone can say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information
FIND BETTER COVERAGE
if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn't necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information
TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT
A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.
I could not find a post or page about SIFT written by Mike Caulfield himself, so i went to the University of Washington's website for this page about it, since that is the university that employs him.
It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the "trace to original context" section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.
EXTRA CREDIT
I personally find that it is important to outright search for the opposite information. For example, I put in a few searches like "Mike Caulfield discredited" "Mike Caulfield wrong" "SIFT method bad" etc. I found nothing showing me any indications this method has any problems. Interestingly, somehow this did turn up an article about news literacy on Medium, which was actually written by Mike Caulfield in April of 2017
