Five Ways to Spot Fake News and Other Questionable Sources (Advice from a Reference Librarian)

My high school history teacher once told our class, “Don’t believe everything you read in black and white.” With the typical skepticism of most teens, I thought, “Yeah, right.”

This was before the World Wide Web and its possibility of endless information. In light of the fake news scandal and how fake news possibly affected the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, I’ve been thinking about what that teacher said. As a librarian, I wonder how to help people determine whether or not a source they find online is legitimate and whether or not to use it to make important decisions or inform them in general.

Librarians do more than tell people where to find books or what books to chose for their book club. And public reference librarians can help customers (or patrons, as we lovingly call them) evaluate sources, including those on the Internet.

For the past seven years, I’ve taught information literacy workshops at a local community college and have helped hundreds if not thousands of library users find credible sources to use in academic research papers and speeches and other projects. While I don’t consider myself an expert, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about this topic with people who may not find themselves in a college class or library anytime soon.

A brief history of information literacy.

Librarians used to teach something known as bibliographic instruction. This revolved around books and showing people how to find and evaluate them. It usually involves searching large tomes containing lists of books to find other books on a specific topic. These books were called bibliographies. Of course, this was taught at a time when books were the main sources of information in libraries, and when I say books, I mean the heavy, voluminous books that lined library shelves worldwide.  They exploded with the musty smell of disintegrating paper whenever you opened their covers. Some of you might remember wandering into a library, enthralled by the vast number of leather and cloth-bound books that seemed to go on row after row. Fortunately, libraries still feature books, but now they are printed on archival, acid-free paper, so they don’t off-gas and permeate a room with that distinctive smell. (However, if you miss it, you can buy a candle that gives off the same odor.)

Around the turn of the century, librarians began to realize that bibliographic instruction carried an outdated meaning. We now dealt with information in vast electronic formats, which at first only included CD-ROM databases, which happily evolved into continually updated online databases and the World Wide Web with its characteristic disorganization. It can’t really be cataloged and classified, although attempts have been made (see http://dublincore.org/ for more information). So the concept of “information literacy” or “digital literacy” was born, and it encompasses much more than how to find books or other sources. Also known as “information competency,” it has evolved to describe and explain to unknowing people, including so-called “digital natives” or millennials, how to find and evaluate the information they encounter online. And with companies such as Facebook and Google helping to spread these sources, I believe it’s important to teach these skills to everyone.

Since many people, once they graduate college, are determined to never step into a classroom again, I’d like to share the five ways anyone who is able to set up a Facebook account can evaluate even the most dubious sources they find online.

I didn’t invent or create these concepts, but over the years I have come up with my own ideas of what they mean. I’ve learned them over the years, first in library school and then as  I’ve taught workshops to college students. I’ve put my own spin on what information literacy or competency means, influenced by librarians who have trained and mentored me. You can find these suggestions in many forms and variations all over the Internet. At the end of this article, I will include links to some sources I’ve found helpful.

1. Authority -- Okay, so this one is easy. Who wrote the article? Look for the author’s name (get that author, as in authority?) anywhere on the article or blog post. Can’t find it? That might be a signal that the article might not be as well-researched as it should. Or it could be a government source or a press release. Maybe you shouldn’t trust that the article is being truthful or, as I’ll explain later, objective. If you can find the author’s name, great. See what other articles and for which publications that author has written. Does he or she have credentials in a particular profession or at least an area of expertise or experience? In this age of Internet anonymity, it may be tempting to look over something as silly as this, but if you are using that source to make an important decision (buying a new car, figuring out if you have a certain disease, or I don’t know, voting for the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!), you might want to do more than a cursory search for the author. Look around the margins of the page if you can’t find it at the top.

2. Accuracy and Reliability -- These are natural extensions of the first concept. If the person who wrote the article did any research, does it show? Does she name her sources? This is a pet-peeve of mine left over from my days as a journalism student. I hate it when a writer uses the tiresome phrase, “according to sources.” I want to scream, “WHAT SOURCES?” If the writer can’t name a source because of confidentiality reasons, at least he or she should tell the reader, or better yet, find a source that can be named.

Even better are a list of verifiable references, either presented in the article in the form of footnotes or at the end of the article as a list that you can explore yourself. I know news articles don’t tend to do this, but journal articles do and I wish more news bloggers would do it.  It’s simple and easy to include these sources, and you don’t have to know a fancy citation style in order to do it. Wikipedia articles, for all their downsides, do sometimes have reference lists at the end of entries, which enable you to do your own research and find sources that meet all the requirements for a reliable source.

Also, check for broken links to other sources. If the person who wrote the article or sponsored it isn’t making sure that the links used are active, then it’s a sign that no one cares. And what does the page look like? Like this unprofessional blog you are now reading or a little more professional, well-formatted, with no spelling or grammatical error.s (ha, ha, just kidding!)

I’m sure you’ve all realized by now that anyone, anywhere can publish information on the web: the little old grandma in California, the Ph.D candidate in the Midwest, the reverend in the South, or the elementary school student in upstate New York. So if anyone can publish a website, what does that mean? It means that information needs to be scrutinized if it is to be taken at face value.

A brief comparison to print sources: if you were waiting in the checkout line and saw the latest news tabloid, would you see that as an accurate representation of the news? Sure, there may be a hint of truth somewhere, but is there really a two-headed baby or a cat that weighs 1,000 pounds alive in the world? I’ll let you decide if that picture is real or not.

3. Purpose -- I see this concept as one of the most important and one people can be manipulated by when reading news articles about highly inflammatory topics. Why is the source being shared with the world? Who put it out there for all to see? The best way to determine who sponsored the site, if it is not present on the page you are viewing, is to find the “about” link, usually located at the bottom of every webpage on that site. If you can’t find it, then truncate the URL (or website address) to the .com or .edu. Or  other extension to see the parent site.

Another thing to consider is the reason the site exists. Is it to persuade others, to sell something (a product, an idea, a philosophy?), to convince you of something, to proselytize, to spoof you or make a fool of you in some way by making up news, to influence the outcome of something important, like a presidential election? Use those critical thinking tools your 9th grade teacher talked about and implored you to use when writing your first research paper and try to determine the motive of the website, article, or blog.

Under this designation I also include the audience. Who is the intended audience of the website? Scholars, voters, the general public? This will help in determining what the purpose of the source is.

A few years ago while I was teaching a class on evaluating sources, an older student challenged  my suggestion that you might want to look for government sources for statistics you might need for a research paper. “You can’t trust the government,” he said rather forcefully. Even with government sources, you’ll want to evaluate the purpose of the information and not blindly accept it because it is official, regardless of who our Commander in Chief is.

4. Objectivity -- This is an extension of purpose. What is the tone of the source? Is it hyperbolic or alarmist in any way? Real news stories, from what I remember learning in journalism 101, should be well-balanced, presenting both sides of an issue as completely as possible. They should not shout or scream about impending doom at you but rather convey information in a measured, even tone.

Websites of nonprofit organizations or think tanks often want to convince you to adopt their point of view, so be careful when reading these sites. Again, it depends on the organization and its mission, which could be benign, but it’s up to you to determine what is presented for the greater good and what isn’t.

5. Currency or Timeliness -- How old is that article? It’s not news if it’s not new, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate or important. This is one factor that depends on many factors, including your topic of interest and your motivation for seeking the information. If you are writing a paper on the impact of social media on the last two Presidential elections, then articles and blogs from 2004 won’t be of much help. If you are interested in why the Founding Fathers instituted the Electoral College, you might be happier with a book, even one dated from the 1980s or older. So determining the date of a source is vital but what’s also important is knowing the best source is for the job.

It helps to know the above concepts to weed out fake news stories, which seem to be more prevalent and problematic today than they were in the past. Using the concepts above and the one I’m about to mention can help readers figure out if a source’s reporting is authentic or fiction.

The best tip I ever learned from a fellow librarian: check with other sources to see if the information you found jibes with what is already known about a topic. She called this “cumulative knowledge,” which is the idea that the more you know about a topic, the better judge you will be of new information about that topic that you come across on Google or on your Facebook or Twitter feed (or whatever new social media phenomenon supercedes them). So if you read that the President sold the White House to a foreign country, and no other news source, including those known well to the public, reports this story on its website, it’s likely to be fake.

Happy searching!

References:

http://www.library.georgetown.edu/tutorials/research-guides/evaluating-internet-content - This is a nice, bullet-pointed list of the main ways to determine if a source is worth reading.

http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency - The Association of College and Research Libraries’ definition of Information Literacy Competency and the standards to be taught in higher education.

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/teaching-information-literacy-skills - Reading Rockets page on “Teaching Information Literacy Skills" to children.

Shine a light on fake news (photo by A.Z.)