Use the SIFT skills employed by many fact checkers to determine if a news source or claim is factual and trustworthy. Simply put, the SIFT skills are:
| S |
Stop! Do NOT read the source you just found, instead: |
| I |
Investigate the source. Use Google and/or Wikipedia to find out more about the source of information. If Wikipedia doesn't have enough information, look at the linked sources at the bottom of the Wikipedia article. |
| F |
Find the original source. If the source you found seems to be quoting from another article or other source, find the original source information to confirm facts and investigate the original source. |
| T |
Look for Trusted sources. Build a library in your mind of sources you have found to be trustworthy. When you see a claim online, you can Google the claim and add the name of one of your trusted sources to see if they have covered the same story. Fact checking websites like Snopes are great sources of trustworthy information because of the amount of research they do to verify a story. |
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