Lateral reading: The best media literacy tip to vet credible sources

Graphic: MediaWise/Poynter

Poynter
About 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data are created every day, according to IBM. Scientist David Helfand says that is equal to 5 trillion books, enough to stretch around the equator on a bookshelf over 1,600 feet high.

In other words, the internet is constantly updated with new articles, videos, photos, posts — and even websites — every day. In the age of so much information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between good and bad sources. So, if you want to evaluate a site’s reliability, how should you do it?

Most people determine the credibility of a website by reading vertically, staying inside the website to decide if it’s reliable. We have always been taught to read this way— from the top to the bottom.

“When trying to determine who is behind online information, people … make judgments based on features internal to a website like its URL, design, functionality or content. However, these features are not effective ways to evaluate a site and need to be explicitly challenged,” researchers at Stanford History Education Group explain.

After studying professional fact-checkers, the Stanford History Education Group found that another approach is far more effective for assessing sites: lateral reading. MORE