Verification as a Practice#
Week 2 — SIFT and lateral reading#
Leave the tab.#
The four moves#
- Stop — before you react, before you share
- Investigate the source — who is saying this, and why would they know?
- Find better coverage — what do other, more reliable sources say?
- Trace claims, quotes and media — back to where they actually originated
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
— Herbert Simon, 1971
Why this reframing works#
Most advice says: think harder about the thing in front of you. SIFT says: stop looking at it and go check somewhere else first. None of the four moves require you to be smarter than whoever made the claim.
Lateral reading#
Professional fact-checkers barely read the page they’re checking. They open new tabs and read about the source before reading from it. Reading “vertically,” staying on the page, is exactly what a well-engineered forgery is built to survive.
“Critically ignoring”#
Not every claim deserves your attention. Deciding not to spend time on something — on purpose, for a stated reason — is a skill in its own right, not a failure to engage.
Further reading#
Mike Caulfield, “SIFT (The Four Moves),” 2019 — read it before next session
Where SIFT runs out#
SIFT tells you where a claim came from. It doesn’t tell you whether an image was generated from nothing, or whether a watermark survived a screenshot. That’s weeks 4 through 7.