Verified

Mike Caulfield 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. Creator of the SIFT methodology, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops. Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and the founder of the Stanford History Education Group, whose state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy has been distributed freely to schools all over the world. He is the author of Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), also published by the University of Chicago Press.  

Introduction
1 Get Quick Context: It Can Take as Little as Thirty Seconds—Seriously!
   The Three Contexts
   “Do I Know What I’m Looking At?”
   Introducing SIFT
   Stop! (Or, How to Fail at Source-Checking Even If You’re the New York Times)
   Investigate the Source
   Find Better Coverage
   Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context
   Takeaways
2 Cheap Signals: Or, How Not to Get Duped
   Easily Fakeable Questions
   Gameable Signals of Credibility
   First Impressions Matter . . . Except When They Don’t
   URLs Matter . . . Except When They Don’t
   What about Dot-Coms?
      Going Deeper: The “Org” of Dot-Org Is Big Business
   Nonprofit Status: “Nearly Anything Goes”
   Numbers That Bamboozle
   Links That Lead Astray
   Takeaways
3 Google: The Bestie You Thought You Knew
   Interpreting and Mining Search Results
   Why Seeing on the Internet Isn’t Believing
   Decoding Google’s Knowledge Panel
   Different Sources, Different Purposes
      Going Deeper: What Arsonist Birds Teach Us about Different Sources
   When Featured Snippets Get It Wrong
      Going Deeper: Google’s Three Vertical Dots Are a Great Hack for Lateral Reading
   Keywords and Inferred Intent: How to Think like Your Search Engine
   Keywords: The Underlying Architecture of Search
   Inferred Intent: Providing Google with a “Tell”
   Google Is a Mirror Reflecting Back What You Give It
   A Search Engine, Not a “Truth Engine”
   Takeaways
4 Lateral Reading: Using the Web to Read the Web
   Get off the Page!
   Lateral Reading: Checking Information like a Fact-Checker
   Why Lateral Reading Works
   Little Shift, Big Payoff
   Lateral Reading Puts You in Control
   Avoid Promiscuous Clicking: Practice Click Restraint
   The “Vibe” of the Search Engine Results Page
   Takeaways
5 Reading the Room: Benefiting from Expertise When You Have Only a Bit Yourself
   Why You Can’t “Just Do the Math”
   Reading the Room: Quick Assessment of a Range of Expert Views
      Going Deeper: Why We Call This “Reading the Room”
   Trust Compression, or How to Avoid Info-Cynicism
   Reading the Room on the Mask Issue
   The Perils of the Single Academic Contrarian
      Going Deeper: What Makes a Good Summary Source?
   Takeaways
6 Show Me the Evidence: Why Scholarly Sources Are Better than Promotional Materials, Newsletters, and Random Tweets
   What’s Peer Review?
   Peer Review: “The Worst Way to Judge Research, Except for All the Others”
   The Problem of the Single Study
   Literature Reviews: A Bird’s-Eye View of Multiple Studies
      Going Deeper: Journals That Prey on Unsuspecting Victims
   Real History, Fake History: How to Tell the Difference
   Using Google Scholar to Find Scholarly Sources
   The Vibe of Google Scholar’s Results Page
   Using Google Scholar as a Quick Reputation Check
   Takeaways
7 Wikipedia: Not What Your Middle School Teacher Told You
   What about the Mistakes?
      Going Deeper: Wikipedia to Britannica: “He That Is without Sin . . .”
   Anyone Can Change Wikipedia, Can’t They?
   Isn’t Wikipedia Biased?
   Wikipedia as a Tool for Research
   Using Wikipedia to Validate Sources
      Going Deeper: Quickly Validating a Reference from a Book
   Using Wikipedia for Quick Checks of Unfamiliar Websites
   Quick Investigation of a Claim
   Quick Checks of an Unfamiliar Academic Source
   Using Wikipedia to “Read the Scholarly Room”
   Using Wikipedia to Jump-Start Your Research
      Going Deeper: Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of a Bibliographical Reference
   The Messiness of Making Knowledge
   Takeaways
8 Video Games: The Dirty Tricks of Deceptive Video
   False Context
   Exploiting “Seeing Is Believing”
      Going Deeper: Online News Is Often More Credible Than You Think
   Falsely Implied Date
   Connect My Dots, or Creating a False Sense of “Research”
   Deceptively Cropped Video
   Takeaways
9 Stealth Advertising: When Ads Masquerade as News
   The Problem: Stealth Advertising Works
   A Con Is Born
   Newspapers Become Ad Agencies
   The Problem in Three Words: Conflict of Interest
   Disappearing Warning Labels
   Sponsored Propaganda
   Half Truths Are Not Whole Truths
   When Stealth Ads Move to Social Media
      Going Deeper: How Stealth Ads Lose Their Warning Labels
   Protecting Yourself in an Age of Slimy Advertising
   Takeaways
10 Once More with Feeling: Using Your Emotions to Find the Truth
   Emotion Doesn’t Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About
      Going Deeper: Man versus Machine
   “Compellingness” Tells Us What’s Important to Check
   Surprise Is a Sign Our Assumptions Might Be Wrong
   Why Compellingness and Surprise Beat the Checklist
      Going Deeper: Mutant Flowers
   Feeling Overwhelmed? Rethink Your Approach
   Takeaways
11 Conclusion: Critical Ignoring
Postscript: Large Language Models, ChatGPT, and the Future of Verification
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index