Truth is a habit: how professional fact-checkers read, and how to copy them in two minutes

Being hard to mislead is a skill, not a gift. Professional fact-checkers have a simple habit for it, and you can learn the habit in an afternoon. It is one of the most practical forms of personal freedom I know.

People talk a lot about truth and freedom, usually in big terms. I want to talk about them in small terms: what you can do in two minutes, on your phone, when something you have just seen makes your heart rate jump. If you are the kind of person who cares about not being manipulated, this is where the caring turns into a skill.

What the research found

In 2017 a team at Stanford, led by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, watched 45 people evaluate real websites and search for information on social and political topics. The group was 10 professional fact-checkers, 10 university history professors and 25 Stanford undergraduates. The researchers gave them tasks like working out which of two sites was more trustworthy.

The historians and students tended to do what most of us do: they stayed on the page and read it carefully from top to bottom, trusting how professional the site looked, its logo, its address and its "About" page. Many were misled by those cues. The fact-checkers behaved very differently. They left the site within seconds and opened new tabs to find out what other sources said about who was behind it. The Stanford researchers called this lateral reading, and all of the fact-checkers reached a well-supported conclusion, in a fraction of the time. Stanford's report summarises the study, and the published paper appeared in the Teachers College Record.

The finding that struck me is that the fact-checkers were not smarter or better-read. They had a different habit. And a habit can be learned.

The four moves: SIFT

Mike Caulfield, a digital-literacy researcher, turned lateral reading into a short checklist called SIFT, sometimes called the four moves. His own write-up is short and worth reading.

1. Stop. If something makes you furious, thrilled or frightened, or gives you an urge to share it, pause. The stronger the reaction, the more important the pause. Ask whether you know the source, and what you actually know about it.
2. Investigate the source. Before you read the content, find out who is behind it. Open a new tab and search the name of the site or the author, and see what independent sources say. Wikipedia is often a quick way to get a first look.
3. Find better coverage. If a claim matters, look for other, more trusted reporting or analysis on the same claim. See whether it holds up and what the general expert view seems to be.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original. Find the original context of a quote, a statistic or a picture. Was it changed? Did it come from where the post says?

You can run all four in a few minutes. Most of the time you only need the first two.

A worked example

Imagine you see a striking claim in a post with a dramatic headline, from a site you have never heard of.

• Stop. Notice the jolt of anger. That is the cue.
• Investigate. Open a new tab. Search for the site's name. Is it a news organisation? A campaign group? A blog with no track record? What do others say about it?
• Find better coverage. Search the key claim in plain words. Do established outlets report it? Do fact-checking organisations have a page on it?
• Trace. If it quotes a study, find the study. If it shows a photo, run a reverse image search.

Two minutes later you either know the claim holds up, know it does not, or know that nobody serious is reporting it, which is also information.

Why your attention is the thing at stake

The reason I connect this to freedom is simple. A person who can be made angry, afraid or certain by anything that reaches their screen is easy to steer. A person with a two-minute habit for checking is much harder to steer. Nobody has to be an expert on everything. You just have to be difficult to mislead about the few things you are about to believe or repeat.

This links to what I wrote about in doomscrolling, attention and what to build instead. Both are about ownership of your own mind, and how much of it you hand to the feed.

Sovereignty, in small pieces

I use big words sometimes, so let me define what I mean by personal sovereignty in practical terms. To me it means having more of the following in your own hands:

• Attention. Deciding what gets your hours.
• Energy. Understanding and producing some of your own, for example with a small solar kit.
• Food. Being able to grow a little, as in growing food in cities.
• Skills. Knowing how to repair, build or cook something.
• Judgement. Being able to check a claim and form your own view.

None of this is dramatic. It is a life with a bit more slack and a bit less dependence. Each piece is a habit you can start this week.

What this is not

I want to be careful about three things.

• It is not a licence to decide everything you dislike is false. Lateral reading works both ways. It will sometimes tell you that a claim you were hoping was true does not hold up, and that is the point of it.
• It is not cynicism. The aim is not to trust nothing. It is to trust for good reasons.
• It does not need you to be certain. "I checked, and I still do not know" is a perfectly good place to stop, and much healthier than false certainty in either direction.

A habit for a busy mind

For a fast, distractible mind the trick is to make this automatic, because in the heat of the moment you will not remember a list. Try this:

1. Put "S, I, F, T" on a sticky note near your screen for a week.
2. Each time something makes you angry, do only the first letter: stop.
3. Once a day, do the second letter on one thing: look up who is behind a source.
4. Enjoy the small feeling of not having been taken in.

If you would like company while you build the habit, the ADHD MindFlow community is a place where people compare notes without shouting. And when your head is loud after a heavy day online, a few minutes with a listening session is a good way to come back to yourself.

A personal view, with sources linked. The Stanford study is summarised from its published reports, and the SIFT method is Mike Caulfield's.