---

How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding clickbait?

Since 2017, we’ve been teaching students with something called the Four Moves.

Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. We call the “things to do” moves and there are four of them:

Stop

The first move is the simplest. STOP reminds you of two things.

First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.

Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose. If you just want to repost, read an interesting story, or get a high-level explanation of a concept, it’s probably good enough to find out whether the publication is reputable. If you are doing deep research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and independently verify them.

Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. We get quicker with the simple stuff in part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. But in either case, stopping periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key.

Investigate the source

We’ll go into this move more on the next page. But idea here is that you want to know what you’re reading before you read it.

Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well.

This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t be trusted. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.

Find better coverage

Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.

In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. If you get an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied. In lesson two we’ll show you some techniques to do this sort of thing very quickly.

Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.

Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.

In these cases we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in it’s original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

It’s about REcontextualizing

There’s a theme that runs through all of these moves: they are about reconstructing the necessary context to read, view, or listen to digital content effectively.

One piece of context is who the speaker or publisher is. What’s their expertise? What’s their agenda? What’s their record of fairness or accuracy? So we investigate the source. Just as when you hear a rumor you want to know who the source is before reacting, when you encounter something on the web you need the same sort of context.

When it comes to claims, a key piece of context includes whether they are broadly accepted or rejected or something in-between. By scanning for other coverage you can see what the expert consensus is on a claim, learn the history around it, and ultimately land on a better source.

Finally, when evidence is presented with a certain frame — whether a quote or a video or a scientific finding — sometimes it helps to reconstruct the original context in which the photo was taken or research claim was made. It can look quite different in context!

In some cases these techniques will show you claims are outright wrong, or that sources are legitimately “bad actors” who are trying to deceive you. But in the vast majority of cases they do something just as important: they reestablish the context that the web so often strips away, allowing for more fruitful engagement with all digital information.

---

To learn about SIFT in more detail, check out our free three hour online minicourse.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Found some disinfo on TikTok today which had apparently started on Facebook. It’s a video that promotes a variety of bogus and increasingly bizarre claims — there are plastic shards in rice that show up when put in a hot pan, harmful magnetic gunk in your baby formula you can extract with a magnet, poisonous washing powder in your ice cream that can be revealed with a drop of lemon juice.

The TikTok version gets scrambled a bit when you try to watch it in a browser, and WordPress.com doesn’t allow TikTok embeds yet. Thankfully eagle-eyed Twitter user @infuturereverse linked me to a Facebook version of the video so you can watch it here. (And please, please, do watch it, it’s fascinating).

It did well on Facebook too — but that’s not really news at this point. What strikes me is the TikTok success, since this is more rare, and yet seems very TikTok.

Why? Well, it’s presented as a “hacks” video (a genre very popular on TikTok). Hack videos — especially hacks around domestic issues — do well. Some are pretty solid. Others are technically honest but you wonder a bit about the practicality.

There’s also a variation in the form of the “replicable prank ” video. I think of it as a “hack” variation because it usually shows a simple way to execute the prank on others, and executing it requires some knowledge. Pranks as replicable memes often look like hacks. This sort of content already spreads misinformation, where some hacks are overhyped, such as the “hyphen” iPhone Prank that is presented as “erasing your friends phone with a voice command” but really just temporarily crashes the iPhone launcher.

In higher level pranks, the poster pranks the audience intentionally with a “hack” that doesn’t work — for example, demonstrating that the iPhone comes with a secret pair of AirPods that you will find if you tear the box apart, or the current sensation on TikTok of finding cash in hotel bibles, presumably placed by Christians there to reward the faithful. (This is a modern variation on an urban legend that dates back to the 1950s, and made its original digital rounds as an email hoax).

What may not be clear to non-TikTok users is how this sort of fakery is replicated as a meme. One person “finds” money in a bible, then other people post videos of “finding” cash in the bibles. The fake hack spreads not just through the increasing reach of the initial video, but through its replication by others. It suddenly seems like dozens of folks are finding cash in bibles.

These sort of fake hacks work on multiple levels in TikTok. In cases like the bible cash, they are sort of Santa Claus-ish: a group of people in the know bonds around these knowing these are fake, but enjoying and sometimes sustaining the joke through through faking evidence, the way parents fake Santa Claus eating cookies on Christmas. Another group of people believes the hacks are real, and a larger group enjoys wondering if they are real or not in a way that makes the world a bit more magical. It’s really not harmful if people flip through their bibles in hotel rooms and experience some brief anticipation of a cash find. (It’s also spawned some interesting variations where people put non-cash fandom-related things in hotel bibles.)

It’s also interesting to me that for a lot of these you can’t know if it is faked unless you try it yourself — and it is tempting to try, as with the likely real “soda hack”:

As with practical jokes, if you do try to replicate and fail — if, for instance, you try to replicate the meme where you rub your finger against a battery and try to levitate a penny — it’s pretty tempting to pay it forward by creating a fake video yourself (in this case by using video reverse: you spin a penny, watch it fall to a stop, rub your finger against a battery, then reverse the video). I don’t think this is a perversion of TikTok culture — I think it *is* TikTok culture, which often looks like an older sibling showing something new to the middle kid who then shows it to the youngest.

Malicious misinformation is relatively rare on TikTok, but it seems to me that where it does emerge the “food hacks” video is one format that will mesh well with TikTok culture — fake hacks, tricks, and “inside knowledge” loaded with false framing.

What would that look like? It’d look very urban legendish: If there’s an eight next to your product’s barcode it means it was produced by slave labor, if you find these marks in the Starbucks bathroom it’s a sign children have been trafficked there. If your phone makes this kind of static noise it could be a sign of radiation from cell towers, and you need to move away from them immediately. For political stuff, TikToky versions of “this voting machine didn’t record my vote” etc.

The good news is since there’s not really a way for creators to monetize anything on TikTok yet it’s likely to be pretty tame compared to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, at least in the immediate future. But it’d be nice to see people thinking about this sooner rather than later — how do you moderate a TikTok culture that values the sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge “Santa Claus” fakery with one that would like to keep more toxic fakery at bay?

We’ll be adding a couple TikTok examples to our current educational materials, but in the meantime feel free to ask your TikTok misinformation questions below.