Most advice about spotting misinformation asks you to read closely — scrutinize the tone, check the grammar, look for a "too good to be true" feeling. Stanford's research on how people actually evaluate online information found the opposite works better. When Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew compared professional fact-checkers, PhD historians, and Stanford undergraduates, the fact-checkers were faster and far more accurate — and the reason was almost embarrassingly simple. They spent less time on the page in front of them and more time in other tabs, checking who was behind it.
Digital-literacy researcher Mike Caulfield turned that behavior into something you can memorize: SIFT — Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to the original. It isn't a rigid checklist you run top to bottom every time. It's four moves you reach for depending on what you're stuck on. Here's how each one works in practice.
The four moves
Stop
Before you read a word of the argument, stop and notice two things: do you recognize the source, and do you already feel something? The strongest pull to share comes from content that makes you angry or vindicated — which is exactly the content worth slowing down on. Stopping isn't a moral stance, it's a practical one. Most of the checks below take under a minute, but only if you run them before you're emotionally committed to the claim being true.
Investigate the source
Don't read the site's own About page to decide if it's trustworthy — anyone can write a flattering About page. Instead, open a new tab and read laterally: search the outlet's name alongside words like 'wikipedia', 'funded by', or 'ownership'. In under a minute you usually learn who runs it, what its agenda is, and whether it's a real newsroom or a single anonymous blog wearing a newsroom's clothes. Lateral reading is the one habit that separates professional fact-checkers from everyone else.
Find better (or trusted) coverage
You often don't care about the specific article in front of you — you care whether the claim is true. So go looking for the best available reporting on it, not just the first version you saw. Search the claim itself and see who else is covering it and what they concluded. Many viral claims have already been checked; a single search across established fact-checkers tells you whether a verdict already exists. This is the move FAXTR is built to speed up.
Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original
Viral content is usually a screenshot of a summary of a quote of a study — each layer stripping away context. Follow it back. Click through to the actual court filing, the peer-reviewed paper, the full video, the original photo. A quote pulled from a two-hour interview can be technically accurate and still completely misleading. If you can't find the original, that absence is itself a finding.
The core skill: reading laterally
If you take one thing from this guide, take this. When you land on an unfamiliar site, the instinct is to read vertically — scroll down, judge the design, skim the About page, form an opinion without ever leaving. That's how the undergraduates in the Stanford study got fooled. Fact-checkers read laterally instead: they leave the site almost immediately and open new tabs to find out what the rest of the web says about it.
The mechanics are worth spelling out, because it's a habit more than a technique:
- Open a new tab the moment you want to judge a source — don't keep reading the original first.
- Search the source's name plus a neutral qualifier: [site name] wikipedia, [org] funded by, or [author] journalist.
- Skip the first result if it's the source's own website. You want what others say about it, not its self-description.
- Give it about sixty seconds. Lateral reading is meant to be quick — if it's taking longer, that difficulty is often the answer.
In the Stanford test, participants examined two similarly-named medical organizations with very different reputations. Every professional fact-checker sorted out which was the legitimate body; only half the historians and a fifth of the undergraduates did. The difference wasn't intelligence or subject knowledge — it was whether they thought to leave the page and look.
When to use which move
You rarely need all four. If you don't recognize the outlet, Investigate first. If you trust the outlet but want to know whether a specific claim holds up, jump to Find better coverage. If a quote, statistic, or photo is doing the emotional heavy lifting, Trace it back to where it came from. And Stop is the move you run every time, because the whole method only works if you pause before you've decided what you want to be true.
Why a four-item method beats a long checklist
Longer evaluation rubrics exist — the old CRAAP test asks you to score currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose for every source. They're thorough, but people abandon them under real conditions, because you can't score five dimensions on every link in a group chat. SIFT survives contact with a normal day precisely because it's short and because most of it happens in a search box you already know how to use. The point isn't to certify a source as pure — it's to spend your attention where the evidence actually is.
Do the "Find" move in one search
FAXTR searches 100+ fact-checking organizations at once, so a single query tells you whether a claim already has a verdict — free, no login.