AI tools can sometimes generate false information, be outdated, show bias, or provide incorrect sources. That’s why it’s essential to critically review their output and verify any sources they provide to ensure they are accurate and trustworthy. The SIFT method is a straightforward approach to assess the reliability of online information. It consists of four key steps: Stop, Investigate the Source, Find Better Coverage, and Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context. For a more detailed explanation of each step, see the information below.
When you initially encounter a source of information and start to read it—stop. Ask yourself if you know who is behind it and whether you trust the author, publisher, publication, or website. If you don’t, use the other fact-checking moves that follow, to get a better sense of what you’re looking at.
This is a particularly important step because social media, news organizations, and other digital platforms purposely promote sensational, divisive, and outrage-inducing content that emotionally hijacks our attention in order to keep us clicking, liking, commenting, and sharing. Stop and check your emotions before engaging!
You don’t have to do a three-hour investigation into a source before you engage with it. When investigating a source, fact-checkers read “laterally” across many websites, rather than digging deep (reading “vertically”) into the one source they are evaluating. That is, they don’t spend much time on the source itself, but instead they quickly get off the page and see what others have said about the source. They open up many tabs in their browser, piecing together different bits of information from across the web to get a better picture of the source they’re investigating.
Please watch the following short video [2:44] for a demonstration of this strategy. Pay special attention to how Wikipedia can be used to quickly get useful information about publications, organizations, and authors.
What if the source you find is low-quality, or you can’t determine if it is reliable or not? Perhaps you don’t really care about the source—you care about the claim that source is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.
Your best strategy in this case might actually be to look for other coverage that includes trusted reporting or analysis on that same claim. Rather than relying on the source that you initially found, you can trade up for a higher quality source. Please watch this video [4:10] that demonstrates this strategy and notes how fact-checkers build a library of trusted sources they can rely on to provide better coverage.
Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding—but you’re not certain if the cited research paper actually said that. The people who re-report these stories either get things wrong by mistake, or, in some cases, they are intentionally misleading us.
In these cases you will want to trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in its original context and get a sense of whether the version you saw was accurately presented. Please watch the following video [1:33] that discusses re-reporting vs. original reporting and demonstrates a quick tip: going “upstream” to find the original reporting source.