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

By Julie Jargon Updated March 5, 2022 1:45 pm ET From WSJ

The challenge of determining the credibility of online news has gotten a lot harder. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unfolding in real time on traditional and social media, has demonstrated that anyone can be misled.

A media professor publicly put himself in the penalty box after retweeting a pair of out-of-context photos on Ukraine, as well as a false report on Russia’s progress into Kyiv.

“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?

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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.

Posted from SLPRO Z