Navigating Away from Online Misinformation

ASK THE EXPERT, SARAH MCGREW

As a high school history teacher early in her career, Sarah McGrew often asked her students to read and analyze primary sources and answer big historical questions. While it might not have seemed relevant to their day-to-day lives, being able to ferret out reliable information while casting aside questionable claims is actually a key skill for the internet-driven information age, when a non-stop stream of information pours over us from new and existing technologies.

“Information influences how we think, even in ways that we don’t always recognize. We have to be careful when deciding what sources we use to gather information,” explains McGrew.

Today, the assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership researches how students find and evaluate online information on contentious social and political topics—and how schools can better support students to learn effective strategies. BY NATIFIA MULLINGS

WHAT STEPS CAN WE TAKE TO MAKE OURSELVES RESISTANT TO MISINFORMATION?

We should train ourselves to think about where the information we see is coming from and whether we trust that source. A great way to investigate online sources is to use a technique called lateral reading, which Sam Wineburg, professor of education at Stanford University, and I learned from watching professional fact checkers evaluate websites. Anytime you see a site or a post whose source you don’t recognize, open a new tab and search outside the site for more information about its source. If you leave the site and do a quick search for more information, you’ll likely learn so much more about

the author or organization than what you’d find on the “About Us” page or profile. Next, we can practice click restraint while N A V I G A T I N we navigate search results. Research suggests that many young people, and adults too, assume that the top search result is the most reliable. We just click on the first few links and consume whatever information those websites provide. Search engines use algorithms to determine what appears in front of us and the order that it appears. Instead of trusting the algorithm to put the best site first, we should spend time scanning the search results, considering the kind of information we’re searching for, and making a better decision about where to click first. Finally, we should rethink some of our assumptions about how to tell if online information is reliable. For example, there’s a belief that .org websites are more reliable than .com websites, and that’s not necessarily true. Anyone can register for a .org domain. Or, we might have learned that Wikipedia is not a credible source, but Wikipedia can be a great starting point for online research, especially because one of their community standards is that there should be references at the bottom of the page to any claims that are made.

HOW CAN WE COMBAT MISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

First, there are some misconceptions about what makes social media posts more reliable that we need to tackle. People often assume that social media posts with higher levels of engagement— more likes, shares and comments—or that come from accounts with lots of followers and engagement are more reliable. Again, that’s not true; the best way to decide is to read laterally about the source or investigate the claims a post makes through sources you trust.