These questions will help you as you evaluate information.
The following websites have more tools and questions to jump-start your information evaluation:
Strategies for checking information before you pass it on to others. Created by the World Health Organization to combat misinformation about COVID-19, but you can use these questions to evaluate any source.
This resource has questions to ask when evaluating health information.
How to use the CRAAP test (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) and lateral reading (fact-checking as you read) to evaluate information.
"SIFT" is an acronym for Stop, Investigate the source, Find trusted coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context. This model will help you evaluate and put the news into context.
IMVAIN is an acronym used to evaluate the quality of sources (people) interviewed in news stories. It stands for: Independent sources are better than self-interested sources; Multiple sources are better than single sources; sources who Verify are better than sources who assert; Authoritative/Informed sources are better than uninformed sources; and Named sources are better than unnamed sources.
How to Choose your News "With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.
• Informed Health Choices: https://www.informedhealthchoices.org
• iHealthFacts: https://ihealthfacts.ie/
• Be Media Smart: https://www.bemediasmart.ie/
• CRAP: https://sites.google.com/site/crapcraaptest/
• SPAT: http://www.spat.pitt.edu/
• DISCERN: http://www.discern.org.uk/
A tool that analyzes media organizations' political bias. Also lists satirical, pseudo-scientific, and conspiracy theory websites. Media Bias / Fact Check Methodology
A search engine that doesn't track your searches, meaning that it doesn't build a filter bubble around you. Useful for finding information that isn't tailored to your beliefs.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Information found through DuckDuckGo is not necessarily more reliable than other search engines. You will still need to critically evaluate the information you find on DuckDuckGo.
Health (thatsaclaim.org) Key concepts for thinking critically about health claims.
Snopes got its start debunking urban legends and email chain letters, but it has expanded to cover just about everything that can be fact-checked on the Internet. Snopes is "the oldest and largest fact-checking site online, widely regarded by journalists, folklorists, and readers as an invaluable research companion." About Snopes
FactCheck is "a nonpartisan, nonprofit 'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." About FactCheck
PolitiFact is nonpartisan website dedicated to truth in American politics. Their "core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing." About PolitiFact
Did Mark Twain (or Lao Tzu, or Margaret Thatcher, or...you get the picture) REALLY say that? Garson O’Toole of Quote Investigator finds out. About Quote Investigator
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can use it to find out when and where an image first appeared on the Internet.
A list of things to look for and tools to use to see if a photo has been manipulated.
From Poynter. Specifically discusses the U.S.-Iran conflict in 2020, but the tools apply to fact-checking any news photo. Contains questions to ask about images as well as information on using Google's reverse image search, TinEye, and Yandex Images.