Keep this life skill for later
Sign in to save
← All life skills

Learning & thinking · a life skill

Simple Source Checking

read across, not down

A page can't tell you whether to trust it. Its logo, its About page and its .org cost nothing to fake. So before you believe or share something, leave it: open new tabs and see what the rest of the web says about the source and the claim.

  • Easy to start
  • Medium impact
  • Learn it in 1 week
  • Sixty seconds a check
  • Stop
  • Investigate the source
  • Find better coverage
  • Trace it to the original
one post, three new tabs
Checking a post by leaving it: a stop sign on the post, then three new tabs On the left, a post headlined “Sweetener causes memory loss”, with a logo and a .org address. Reading down the page is crossed out. A stop sign sits on its corner. Three arrows lead out of it to three new tabs. The first asks who runs the site and finds it is funded by a maker of a rival sweetener. The second asks who else reports the claim and finds two news desks describing a study in mice. The third goes to the original study, which says thirty mice and “may be associated”. Below, the verdict: a rival's site and a mouse study, so don't share it. STOP [do I know this site?] tab 2 · who runs it? funded by the maker of a rival sweetener tab 3 · who else says so? two news desks: “a study in mice” tab 4 · where did it start? 30 mice, and “may be associated”

Everything the post says about itself was on the page: a logo, a .org, a confident headline. Everything that settled it came from other tabs.

The next time something makes you react

Try it now.

Four moves, from the researcher Mike Caulfield, who called them SIFT. You won't need all four every time. Stop as soon as you know enough.

  1. Stop

    Before you read closely or share, ask: do I know this site, and do I know what it's known for? If not, don't read it yet. And if you find yourself twenty tabs deep, stop again and remember what you wanted to know.

  2. Investigate the source

    Open a new tab and search its name. Read what others say about it, not what it says about itself: who runs it, who pays for it, what it's for. Wikipedia is good for this.

  3. Find better coverage

    Search the claim, not the post. If it's true and it matters, someone you already trust has covered it. If nobody has, that tells you something too.

  4. Trace it to the original

    Follow the quote, the photo or the study back to where it first appeared. See what it said there, in full, and what the version you saw left out.

Do it on the next one

Open the tabs.

Type the name of a site, a person or a group, and the claim it makes. The links open the searches a fact-checker would start with, each in a new tab.

Use their exact words for the claim. Quotation marks around a search find those words, not just the topic.

Who gets it right

The fact-checkers left the page.

  1. Fact-checkers read across

    10: glanced at each site, left it, and searched who was behind it.

  2. Historians, with PhDs read down

    10: mostly judged both sites reliable.

  3. Stanford students read down

    25: mostly trusted the smaller group's site more.

In a Stanford study published in 2017, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew watched 45 skilled readers judge real websites. One task set the American Academy of Pediatrics, a large professional body, beside the American College of Pediatricians, a much smaller advocacy group with a similar name and a similarly polished site.

The historians and students stayed on each site and read down it, and the logos, references and .org addresses took them in. The fact-checkers barely read the sites at all. They opened new tabs, found out who was behind each one, and reached better answers in a fraction of the time.

The idea

Why it works.

Most of what we were taught to check is on the page itself: is there an author, a date, references, a professional look? All of it is cheap to fake. What other people say about a source is much harder to fake, and it's one search away. Wineburg's verdict on the old checklists was blunt: “Their approaches fit the web circa 2001.”

The fact-checkers also showed what the researchers called click restraint: they read the list of search results before clicking any of them, instead of opening the top one. A minute spent off the page saves the ten you'd spend reading something that was never worth it.

Keep it quick

Habits that help.

  • Check the source before the claim. If the source is a lobby, a seller or a joke site, you're done.
  • Read the results before you click. The snippets under each link often answer the question.
  • Notice when you want it to be true. That's when you skip the check, and when it matters most.
  • No answer in a minute? Don't share it. Nothing is lost by waiting for better coverage.

Go deeper

Keep going.

Keep this going in the app.

HourLife turns these ideas into a daily system — goals, habits, focus, and reflection in one private place.

Download on the App Store Download on the Mac App Store See everything HourLife does