How to Tell News Fact From Fiction, Even During a War

“It’s very easy to get caught up in the emotions of war,” David Carroll, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design, said. Photos in two of his retweets weren’t part of the current crisis, he said, and perhaps he should have first tried to search the images in Google. “I was retweeting well-respected, verified people,” he added.

If bogus reports can fool someone who understands—and teaches—the ways of social-media platforms, is there any hope for the rest of us?

Fortunately, there can be. Researchers from the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University taught high-school students in Lincoln, Neb., to corroborate information they found online, with measurable success. 

The skill they taught, “lateral reading,” is a strategy long employed by fact-checkers at news organizations. It involves cross-checking the information in a news article or on a website with key factors—such as the source of that information, and the perspectives and possible motivations of the individuals behind it—to determine the author’s credibility.

The study, expected to be published soon in the Journal of Educational Psychology and funded by Google.org, the charitable arm of Google, involved nearly 500 students in government classes at six high schools. Students at three of the schools received six lateral-reading lessons over three months; students at the other three schools completed only the regular curriculum.

The students were tested on their ability to discern credible online content before and after the lessons were given. All of the students started out with a very low ability to discern credible information. The test scores of trained students improved significantly more than the scores of students in the control group. Whether those skills will translate beyond the classroom is unclear, according to the study’s authors.

Sharper Reading

In the past, students were taught to look at website addresses for credibility. It was once widely believed that a .org URL, which is often used by nonprofits, contained reliable information; likewise a professional-looking website, a strong “About Us” page and claims of nonpartisanship or other statements of non-bias could be trusted as authentic. 

But as groups that try to sway policy and political opinions have become more sophisticated in their methods, this guidance no longer holds up,

Sam Wineburg,

one of the Stanford study authors, said.

In addition to relying on multiple sources, it’s important also to figure out whether a news source has accountability to readers, such as a way to contact authors and editors and a policy and practice of correcting mistakes, said

Emily Bell,

director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

One task in the Stanford study required students to check the credibility of an environmentally themed website created by a scientific-looking nonprofit that claimed not to represent any industry. Students who researched the organization found that the organization had received funding from the oil industry, which could indicate bias toward fossil fuels.

As part of their lateral-reading lessons, students also were taught not to rely solely on the first few websites that come up in a search, because search-result rankings can be affected by paid promotion and search-engine optimization.

Researchers at City University of New York conducted a lateral-reading study with college students, which yielded similar results.

I asked Dr. Wineburg and

Joel Breakstone,

another of the Stanford study authors, for ways lateral reading can be applied to information about the Ukraine war on social media. They provided several examples, including two from the same

Twitter

-verified account of a Belarusian news outlet. One was an announcement that retailer H & M had suspended sales in Russia. The other featured a supposed Time magazine cover visually linking

Vladimir Putin

to

Adolf Hitler.

Simple Google searches demonstrated that the H & M news was accurate, and that the image wasn’t really from Time. The challenge for someone who spotted them on Twitter would be to pause, do a search to check for signs of validity and then, if satisfied, return to Twitter to share or comment. But that requires awareness and impulse control.

Start in Schools

Embedding lateral-reading lessons into social-studies classes is more effective than teaching them as a separate media-literacy course, said

Jaclyn Kellison,

a social-studies curriculum specialist at Lincoln Public Schools, the Nebraska district that participated in Stanford’s study. Students learn the techniques better when applying them as they’re conducting research, she said.

These skills became a priority for the district in 2018 when it began providing Chromebooks to all students. 

“If you’re asking students to open up their Chromebooks, you need to give them the skills to responsibly use them,” Ms. Kellison said. 

The district didn’t have a systematic way of teaching students how to verify information until it tried Stanford’s curriculum. Stanford is making all of its lateral-reading course materials free for educators.

One challenge is to teach students to figure out credible sources for themselves, so educators aren’t accused of bias. “Teachers don’t say, ‘Here’s a list of bad or good sources or those with a liberal or conservative bent,’” said

Rob McEntarffer,

an assessment and evaluations specialist for the district.

Lincoln is now teaching lateral reading to all middle- and high-school students in the 42,000-student district.

It’s one thing to vet online information during research for a school assignment and another to apply the same rigor to a provocative tweet or Instagram post, as Prof. Carroll, the media-design professor, learned.

He said tech companies bear a lot of the responsibility for the spread of misinformation. “They don’t want to slow down the velocity, because the velocity is the business model,” he added.

Facebook

parent company Meta Platforms Inc., which also operates Instagram, said it has implemented a number of ways to fight the spread of misinformation around the Ukraine war on its platforms, including by demoting posts on Facebook that contain links to Russian state-controlled media websites and labeling the links so people know where they lead before clicking on or sharing them. Twitter also has said it will reduce visibility of tweets containing content from Russian state-controlled media and label them. Twitter also has created a dedicated page containing reliable information and updates about the conflict.

It’s unrealistic to fact-check every Instagram post or tweet that crosses our feeds. But we can practice restraint. As part of his Twitter mea culpa, Prof. Carroll decided not to tweet for a day.

“I gave myself a time-out because that’s what I’d do to my kids,” he said.

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Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com