Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Also, trace any links within a source to confirm that the claims are consistent and from credible sources.
Watch the following video to learn more:
Online Verification Skills - Video 3 : Find the Original Source by CTRL-F is closed captioned and a transcript is available on YouTube. (1 minute, 34 seconds.)
Need to figure out if an image is credible? Do a reverse Image search using Google.
When you find what seems like a promising source, and it has passed the 'Investigate the Source" stage, make sure you trace any claims, or links that are presented in the article. Today's web articles generally have descriptive hyperlinks that link the claim with the source. You'll want to make sure that the sourcing within the article is coming from credible sources as well, and that they are not relying on sources of extreme bias, or ones with credibility problems to build their claims.
Even though we have already established the HuffPost article as a poor choice due to credibility issues and a heavy bias rating, we're going to take a look at it and trace the claims. Generally while researching, we would only delve into tracing claims if the article passed the "Investigate the Source" stage. For a real world application, this is a great practice to have to verify claims you come across while using social media and personal information seeking. This is the first time we are actually looking at the content of the article.
Watch the following video to see how I do it.
Trace All Claims (with HuffPost article) (2023) by Meredith Tummeti is licensed CC BY 4.0. The Video is closed captioned and a transcript is available on YouTube. (approximately 9 minutes)
Now, it's time to practice tracing claims.
