Lateral Reading

If you or your students use social media or the internet there’s a strategy you have to learn called lateral reading.

Love lateral reading because in 15 years of being a school librarian, it’s the strategy that’s the streamlined, efficient, and intuitive that I’ve ever taught my students.

In a nutshell here’s how lateral reading works.
I find a source on the internet, then I open a whole bunch of tabs in my browser, and I Google the name of my original source, and I look to see what the other sources have to say about my original source.

Let’s walk through a quick example.
Let’s say I’m doing some research on artificial intelligence and I wanna use this source.
So the first thing I’m gonna do, rather than reading through the whole source and scrolling down vertically, I’m gonna figure out what organization is behind this source.
So I see it’s NewsPunch, and then I’m going to open a new tab and in my Google window I’m going to type in NewsPunch.

So now that I’ve Googled NewsPunch, I’m gonna look to see what other sources have to say about NewsPunch.
We always encourage our students to use Wikipedia for this exercise.
So when I go to Wikipedia, it tells me that NewsPunch is a Los Angeles based fake news website known for spreading conspiracy theories, political misinformation, and hoaxes.

But that’s just what one sources says, so now I need to corroborate that.
So let’s go back to our list of sources that came up when we Googled NewsPunch and see if other sources agree with what was written in Wikipedia.

So this second source here is from factcheck.org and it says “Everything on this website is fiction… it is not real.”
Um, another one, let’s look at this headline from Mashable, it says, “Fake news sites are simply changing their domain name”, another indication that NewsPunch might be fake news.

Then I have result for Ad Fontes Media, let’s go ahead and open this, and Ad Fontes Media says that NewsPunch is hyper-partisan right and the reliability is unreliable and problematic.

So now I’ve looked at three other sources in addition to Wikipedia and they all seemed to confirm this idea that NewsPunch is fake news and not necessarily the most reliable source.
This took me maybe a minute.

Lateral reading is also a part of the Civil Online Reasoning framework that was designed by the History Education Group at Stanford University.
I’ll put some resources on my blog, noshhinghere.blogspot.com so you can get an idea of how I use this with students.

Although I think this is by bar the best method for evaluating sources, it will take your students a little bit of practice to get the hang of it.