If a claim causes strong emotions — anger, glee, pride, vindication — and that emotion causes you to share a “fact” with others, STOP. Emotionally loaded language is a bias tactic that information outlets use to keep you reading and hopefully sharing the content you have read. You must fact-check this claim. In addition, if you get lost, or hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole during your investigation, STOP. Back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions. Take a moment to STOP, ask yourself whether you know and trust the author, publisher, publication, or website. If you don’t, use the other fact-checking moves, to get a better sense of what you’re looking at, and whether you should trust it.
Let's practice this together with a source I found through Google. Open the following link in a new tab so you can practice along with me.
Now that you have opened the link, take a look at the headline and the subtitle below it. Is it using any emotionally loaded language designed to elicit an emotional response from the reader?
Personally, this headline is alarming. It uses the word "feared" and gives a large number, 300 million, close to the number of people in the United States, who will lose their homes. This headline and description was most likely crafted to inspire fear or anxiety, so you will continue to read the content and hopefully share it through your social networks. Feelings of alarm, fear and anxiety are "red flags".
At this point, we are not taking time to read the entire article. We want to quickly evaluate the source first for credibility before we invest any time reading the article.
Next up, an activity to practice this skill with a web article for your own research topic.
