To judge an unfamiliar website, leave it: open new tabs and find out what independent sources say about the organization behind it, before spending any time on the site's own content, design, or "About" page.

How to do it

1. 1Resist the urge to evaluate the page in front of you. Logos, a .org address, references, a professional layout, and an "About us" statement are all controlled by the site owner and cost almost nothing to fake.
2. 2Within the first half-minute, open a new tab and search the name of the organization or author, plus words such as "funding", "owner", "criticism", or "who runs".
3. 3Skim the results page before clicking. Professional fact-checkers practise click restraint: they read the snippets and choose the most independent result, not the first one.
4. 4Use a reference source as a starting map. An encyclopedia article on the organization, including its citations and edit history, will usually tell you within a minute whether it is a research institute, a trade association, or an advocacy group.
5. 5Ask three questions of what you find: who is behind this, what is their stake in the topic, and what do sources with no stake say about their reliability?
6. 6Only then go back and read the content, with the source's interests in mind.

When to use it

• •A professional-looking organization you have never heard of is cited as an authority.
• •A health, financial, or scientific claim comes from a site whose name sounds official.
• •You are about to rely on a study, a think-tank report, or an "independent" review site.
• •Helping a student or relative who judges sites by how they look.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

Wineburg & McGrew (2019) observed 10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact-checkers, and 25 Stanford undergraduates evaluating live websites. Historians and students mostly read vertically, staying on the page and judging it by its features, and were frequently fooled; in one task most of them rated the site of a small advocacy group that split from the main professional body as more reliable than, or equal to, the site of the large professional association of paediatricians. Fact-checkers left the site almost immediately, read what others said about it, and reached correct conclusions in a fraction of the time. McGrew et al. (2019) and Wineburg et al. (2022) showed in intervention studies that students taught lateral reading improved significantly at evaluating sources. Evidence strength: moderate to good. The expert-novice study is small and observational; the teaching studies are quasi-experimental and field-based with consistent positive results.

1. Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1-40
   The expert-novice study showing that fact-checkers outperform historians and students by leaving the site to investigate it.
2. McGrew, S., Smith, M., Breakstone, J., Ortega, T., & Wineburg, S. (2019). Improving University Students' Web Savvy: An Intervention Study. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 485-500
   Intervention evidence that brief instruction in lateral reading improves source evaluation.
3. Wineburg, S., Breakstone, J., McGrew, S., Smith, M. D., & Ortega, T. (2022). Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: A District-Wide Field Study in High School Government Classes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(5), 893-909
   Field study showing classroom instruction in lateral reading improves performance on live-web evaluation tasks.