Hapgood

Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is… Continue reading

Putting a couple notes from Twitter here. One of the ideas of SIFT as a methodology (and of SHEG’s “lateral reading” as well) is that before one reads a person must construct a context for reading. On the web that’s particularly important, because the rumor dynamics of the web tend to level and sharpen material… Continue reading

The Four Moves have undergone some tweaking since I first introduced them in early 2017. The language has shifted, been refined. We’ve come to see that lateral reading is more of a principle underlying at least two of the moves (maybe three). We’ve removed a reference to “go upstream” which was a bit geeky. All… Continue reading

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to… Continue reading

TL;DR: I am announcing a project to get students and faculty to produce 1,000 new Wikipedia articles on significant English-language local newspapers by October 12, 2018. This will represent a substantial increase in Wikipedia coverage of these papers (An increase of 1,000 U.S. papers would be almost a 40% increase in U.S. coverage, for example).… Continue reading

Here’s a simple activity you can try in your class: Have students execute a Google search that is a question. Then have the students look at the top five results, and using lateral reading pick the source that is most likely to be authoritative and the source they think is least authoritative. Have them talk… Continue reading

The following is a provocation for #EngageMOOC. Thanks to Bonnie Stewart and the rest of the #EngageMOOC crew for inviting me to contribute. Whooping Cough When I was in my twenties I went to the doctor with a cough I believed was whooping cough due to the tell-tale “whoop” intake of breath that occurred after… Continue reading

This is Tim Gunn, the star of the Project Runway series, and a gay rights advocate. But is that message he is holding up for real? It looks like it might be another example of sign-faking, where the content of pieces of paper held up by someone are digitally altered. Now the first step of… Continue reading

I’ve talked about how you have three basic moves in web investigations: Check for previous work Go upstream Read laterally These can be used on simple claims (“Bernie Sanders shouted ‘Death to America’ at a Communist rally”) to get an answer quickly. But the real reason I like this set of moves is that they… Continue reading