As we scroll through social media, we oftentimes read headlines and take them at face value without doing any additional digging. It’s become common practice not to fact-check information beyond our first impression of it. “A survey of 1,492 American adults in 2014 found that 58% did not watch, read, or hear any news beyond the headlines in the previous week.”

However, when we only read headlines, we can be misled, whether intentionally or not. As mentioned by Full Fact, “often something important goes missing, or they [journalists] end up saying something else by mistake.”

This can cause a lot of confusion and misinformation. That is why it is always best to do your own research to confirm the claims you see. One method of doing this is called SIFT.

SIFT stands for stop, investigate, find, and trace.

How do you use SIFT?

Let’s use this article from Facebook to walk through the steps of SIFT.

The post starts with an attention-grabbing caption: “Can this save hockey in the desert?”

The article headline reads: “Arizona Coyotes release details of proposed entertainment district near Scottsdale.”

For any NHL Coyotes fans. in Arizona, this will get your attention due to the team’s inability to secure a home stadium for the past two years.

At this point, we will want to stop and see who is making this claim. Do we trust them?

Arizona’s Family is a reputable news source in the valley; however, for this exercise, we will assume we do not know who they are. What do we do next?

We want to investigate who the source, Arizona Family, is. With a quick search, we can find their “About” page on their website. They provide a statement outlining who they are, who they serve, and who they are owned by.

Through further research, we find that Gray Media Group is a publicly traded media company that was founded in 1946 and they currently own or operate 180 stations across the U.S.

This seems like a solid source for news; let’s move on to the next step.

Now we want to find additional sources reporting on this story. To do this, I did a quick search of “Coyotes propose arena Scottsdale“. The search brings up multiple well-known sites, as well as some less familiar sites covering the same story.

I found the variations in headlines interesting. A lot of the other outlets provided headlines that stated more factual information in their titles. This was encouraging when researching the validity of the original claim, and I ended up learning more information from the additional coverage I reviewed. This leads us to the final step.

In the final step, we want to trace the information back to the original source, which in this case is the Arizona Coyotes themselves. On their website, they released a very detailed announcement of their plans. While the Arizona Family article did not have as much factual information as the original source, it did prove to be a true claim.

In this instance, I thought the initial post was playing on emotions a little and possibly trying to get clicks. By the end, I could see that they had played to emotion in their original post, but the claim they made was in fact correct and from a reputable source.

There are many instances where this process would uncover misinformation. As we head into a political season, it will be especially important for people to strengthen their media literacy and ability to fact-check information so as not to be misled.

Through the SIFT process, we are able to identify a source’s legitimacy and do our own fact-checking to see if a claim being made is true. This is a good practice to get into before taking a headline as fact or allowing ourselves to be misled by bad actors.

Misinformation and disinformation have become so commonplace in our everyday lives that we may not even recognize how prevalent they are or how to properly identify them. A good place to start is learning the difference between misinformation and disinformation.

Misinformation is false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.

Disinformation is misinformation that is knowingly or intentionally spread.

Rumor Guard

Rumor Guard is a website that was created to help recognize and stop misinformation. The website fact-checks viral rumors and provides tips to help users build their literacy skills and evaluate stories they see online.

They evaluate each topic using five different factors:

• Authenticity: Is it authentic?
• Source: Has it been posted or confirmed by a credible source?
• Evidence: Is there evidence that proves the claim?
• Context: Is the context accurate?
• Reasoning: Is it based on solid reasoning?

This site is useful in that it acknowledges current events and stories that are going viral, and it provides an easy-to-understand formula that people can use on their own to identify if a story is true or if it is full of misinformation. I think this approach is effective because it offers guidance on stories that are currently in the media that people may be subjected to and helps them identify ways in which they are true or not. This is a tool that I find beneficial in educating media literacy in terms of misinformation.

Fake It To Make It

Fake it to make it is a game you can play with the goal of making profit off of sharing fake news to specific target audiences. There are various goals you have to achieve, such as triggering a certain feeling or getting a certain amount of shares from a certain political party.

This game, while incredibly time-consuming, was fairly entertaining. It provides insight into tactics people may use to trigger emotion, gain views and shares, and increase their profits through sharing misinformation. I did not find it particularly useful in terms of teaching about misinformation or how to identify misinformation. Because of this, I do not think this is a useful tool for teaching or eradicating misinformation, but it is more likely to showcase how easy it is for misinformation to spread if you target the right audience.

Overall, it is up to us as media consumers to prioritize our media literacy. There are many educational tools available, but not all of them provide guidance that we can apply to our daily media consumption to identify truth. Learning to identify and working to eradicate misinformation will take a conscious effort.