Trace Claims to Original Context

Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context

So far, we have ourselves a tidy little model. There are three contexts (source, claim, and you). There are the first three moves of SIFT (stop, investigate, and find). The contexts more or less match the moves. For the first context, the context of the source (and it’s almost too easy a match here), you investigate the source. For the second context, the context of the claim, you find better coverage. For the third context, the context of you, you ponder your own strengths and limitations. You ask yourself what you think you’re looking at and how sure you are about it: you “stop.” (OK, our order is a bit off here, but they match).

Three contexts. Three moves. So why do we want to go mucking it up with a fourth item? Are we asymmetrical sadists?

Our teaching experience over the last five years helps explain the need for this final move. Consider a frightening headline about spiders that a friend shares online.

There are two sources to consider. The first is the sharing source: the person who passes the information on to friends and family. In the authors’ example, that person is Mike.

If it were an article on web credibility that Mike was sharing, maybe the sharing source would have been enough (as when a Sacramento reporter posts about COVID-19 in Sacramento). Sometimes the person sharing something with you knows a lot about the subject. If they say the article is legit, you pretty much take their word for it.

Other times it’s more complex. If the person sharing isn’t known to have extensive knowledge of that field but is sharing a story from a news outlet, the authority of the claim being made is derived from the reporting source, the news outlet where the person sharing found the item.

This seems like an obvious point, but we’ve found that some people struggle with it. Presented with a TikTok Crocs influencer sharing an article from the New York Times, we sometimes see students say something to the effect of “I checked out the source, and this is not a spider expert. They sell Crocs!” Or maybe, in our example, “He works in media literacy!” Nice try, nerd!

In any case, in this example, the authority for the claim came from the reporting source, and that’s where we had to go to evaluate the claim.

A headline can be deceiving, and in this case, it was. When we clicked through to obtain some much-needed context about these spiders (which, need we remind you, can fly nearly one hundred miles), we found an authoritative source, Scientific American, a science magazine described in the book as having been around for 176 years, that presented a far different story than the headline.

When we encourage you to trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context, we don’t intend for you to have to find your way to some original spreadsheet from Spider Labs, Incorporated. We don’t want you to have to become an arachnologist just to figure out whether spiders are likely to ruin your spring break. But as information travels on the web and makes its way from researcher to newspaper article to blog entry and ends up on your Aunt Velma’s Facebook page, context is the first casualty. Seeing evidence in its original context can prevent you from selling your New England house in a panic just because a headline writer at Live Science was feeling saucy.

The four SIFT moves are to stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace the claim to its original context. Sometimes that last move is as simple as clicking a link; sometimes it takes more work. The authors contrast this approach with lingering playground rumors from the 1970s, such as the claim that Pop Rocks candy ruptured a child’s stomach. That claim becomes a question to investigate, rather than a story to keep repeating.