Lateral Reading: a key way to protect yourself from 'fake news'
Or, how to think like a fact-checker.
You may be a smart person. Hyper-intelligent. Really good at critical thinking. But you can still be fooled into believing something on the internet that is untrue…especially when it looks credible.
This can happen whether you are a ‘digital immigrant’ (someone who got used to the internet later in life) or a ‘digital native’ (Gen Z or younger millennials who’ve grown up with the internet being a central part of their lives).
Why is that so?
This is because we tend to read the way we have always done, i.e., read or skim through articles until they’re finished. If we suspect something about that article, we go to other pages in the website, or we go to the ‘about’ section of the website. This traditional way of reading on the internet is called Vertical Reading: because we’re scrolling up and down; then clicking on another link and skimming up and down.
But a better way to read on the internet today is Lateral Reading. It sounds like a fancy term but it’s pretty basic. When you want to know whether an article or website is credible or not, all you need to do is to leave the website and look for references to it on Google or any other search engine.
Here’s a 54-second video that explains it. It features the writer and YouTuber John Green, but the first part contains my commentary over his static image.
(Here’s the entire John Green video.)
Example: vertical reading vs lateral reading
Let’s illustrate the benefits of lateral reading. The task is to evaluate the website OpIndia. Is it credible or not?
Video 1: Vertical Reading
If you couldn’t view the video, here’s what I did. I looked at OpIndia’s website in three steps.
First, I scrolled up and down and noted that it looks like any other website in that it has multiple stories and seems to be updated regularly. Second, I looked closely at the story titles and noted that the website is preoccupied with criticising Muslims and liberals. Third, I looked at the two ‘about us’ sections and concluded that it does give the reader a lot of information, though all of this is information it has provided itself (no third-party endorsements).
This is not enough to help us evaluate the credibility of this website.
Video 2: Lateral Reading
In this next video, I typed ‘OpIndia’ in the Google search bar and rapidly opened new links about it. I looked at the Wikipedia article on it, and went into the citations. I then found a paper published by the BBC about fake news purveyors, and then I found out why OpIndia was denied accreditation by the International Fact Checking Network.
I concluded that Lateral Reading gave me more information about the credibility of OpIndia than regular reading.
In conclusion: readers can repeat this exercise with any website. You can even use it evaluate BOOM.
Think like a fact-checker
I found out about Lateral Reading first from Sam Wineburg, a charismatic professor of history at Stanford University where I was a fellow in 2018-19. Wineburg has a teacher’s ability to find the right phrase to convey a lesson. “We need a license to drive on the information highway,” he said more than once across several meetings.
A few years ago, Wineburg and a colleague Sarah McGrew recruited 10 historians (all PhDs), 10 fact-checkers, and students at Stanford to evaluate sources. In a working paper, they revealed that both the historians and Stanford students (some of the smartest people) often were unable to evaluate questionable sources. Fact-checkers, on the other hand, were able to do so, in a matter of seconds.
The difference? Fact-checkers are used to lateral reading.
There are two aspects to reading like a fact-checker though that are worth pointing out:
Lateral reading sometimes involves reading less, not more.
We’re used to the idea that in order to investigate a website, we have to read thoroughly. But lateral reading involves a 360 degree approach and doesn’t require more reading, not necessarily.Lateral reading involves reading several tabs simultaneously.
Fact-checkers open up several links in seconds. They hop from link to link, and tab to tab, reading here and there before settling on some key passages.
Winburg and McGrew wrote:
Fact checkers’ success was closely tied to what we think of as taking bearings, a concept borrowed from the world of navigation. Exploring an unfamiliar forest, experienced hikers know how easy it is to lose their way. Only foolhardy hikers trust their instincts and go traipsing off. Instead they rotate their compass’s bezel to determine bearings—the angle, measured in degrees, between North and their desired destination.
Bottomline: In order to begin thinking like a fact-checker, all you have to do is start reading laterally from now on.
But what about WhatsApp?
In most Asian settings, it’s not websites that need evaluating, but WhatsApp messages. Can you use lateral reading for them?
Absolutely, says Masato Kajimoto, a teacher and professor. At a bootcamp on news literacy in December 2019, Kajimoto (who works at Hong Kong University) said that one can use the same principles to evaluate content on WhatsApp. Just copy the message, or part of it, and paste it into a browser. Then look for multiple entries on it. Improvise.
The only difference, Kajimoto said, was that many Asian languages don’t have comprehensive Wikipedia pages. Still, the process works.
Postscript: Lateral Reading is not a replacement for close reading. “This is neither a plea to banish books nor to turn all reading into ten minute exercises,” write Wineburg and McGrew. “Close reading, the careful, analytic search for pattern, detail, and nuance, is essential…But when the goal is to quickly get up to speed, the close reading of a digital source…proves to be a colossal waste of time.”
As Abraham Lincoln once said , "Just because something is listed on the web with an image of mine next to it doesn't mean I said it."