Leave the page: who is behind this?

Fact-checkers judge a source by leaving it and asking what others say about it.

Faced with an unfamiliar site, most people read it more carefully: the About page, the design, the tone, the references. Professional fact-checkers do something else. They leave the page almost at once and open new tabs to find out what other sources say about the one in front of them: who runs it, who pays for it, what it has published before. The Stanford History Education Group called this lateral reading, after the way the tabs run sideways across the screen.

In their study, historians and university students who read vertically, staying on the page, were taken in by polished sites with hidden sponsors. Fact-checkers who read laterally reached a sound judgement in minutes. Later studies taught the habit in a college course and in school classes, and found that it stuck.

The habit is a question, not a verdict: who is behind this, and how do I know? An outlet owned by a political party, a company or a trust can still be right; an outlet nobody can trace can still be wrong. Knowing who is behind it tells you what to check next, and whose interest to keep in mind while you read.

Two smaller moves go with it. Click restraint: before opening the first result of a search, read down the list and choose. And source first: before judging a claim, find where it started, not where you met it.