Lecture 02 — Verification as a practice

SIFT, lateral reading, and why "critically ignoring" something is a skill in its own right

1 March 2027

Most advice about online misinformation tells you to think harder about the thing in front of you. Mike Caulfield’s SIFT method does the opposite: it tells you to stop looking at the thing in front of you and go look somewhere else first. Stop. Investigate the source. Find better coverage. Trace the claim to its origin. None of these four moves require you to be smarter than whoever made the claim — they require you to leave the tab.

That reframing matters more than ever now that the “thing in front of you” can be generated to specification. A forged claim can be engineered to survive your close reading, because your close reading is exactly what it was optimised against. It is much harder to engineer a claim that survives being checked against everything else that is or isn’t said about it elsewhere.

Outline#

• the four moves of SIFT, and why order matters
• lateral reading: professional fact-checkers barely read the page they’re checking
• “critically ignoring”: the skill of not spending your attention on something, on purpose

Reading#

Caulfield & Wineburg, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023), chapters 1–3.

Further reading#

SIFT (The Four Moves) is Mike Caulfield’s own 2019 post introducing the method — the primary source Verified is built on, released under a CC BY licence, which is why so many university library guides quote it directly rather than paraphrasing.