Now, put your new lateral reading skills into practice!
Picture © Sophie Neilan 2020
Evaluate the following piece of online information using the Lateral Reading techniques you have learnt:
Rocket Lab successfully catches falling rocket booster with a helicopter (From The Register)
Please refer to the screen capture file below, in case the webpage is faulty or has been updated:
Question 2 (Self-reflection): What are your findings so far that have helped you determine its reliability/unreliability?
Spend some time to read through Our Findings on the next tab within the current box! If you have any questions or novel findings, please feel free to contact Librarian Zhenyan Li.
Below are some examples of useful sources that could help us evaluate The Register and its claim in the article:
Judged from the history, readership and editorial team, The Register seems pretty legit. But bear in mind that news sources may have their own points of view, which could potentially influence the angle they look at a matter or the way they output content. For example, it’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article that The Register has published headlines and stories which have generated controversy with The Guardian. Hence, The Register is likely a source with varying levels of credibility. When we read its content, we’d better read more critically and differentiate facts from opinions.
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is a great tool that evaluates the level of bias of media publications. It rates The Register 'Least Biased' based on minimal editorializing and 'High' for factual reporting due to a clean fact check record. Its credibility rating also shows 'High Credibility'.
To further assess the credibility of The Register, we found that it had been quoted by a number of reliable news sources, such as BBC, The Verge, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, WIRED, etc. Here are a few examples:
To investigate the reported claim, we referred to the original news release by Rocket Lab, Rocket Lab Successfully Deploys 34 Satellites and Catches Rocket Booster Returning from Space with Helicopter, and verified that the version of story reported by The Register was presented in line with the original release.
We also looked up credible news sources and found quite a number of news coverage reporting the same story, which corroborated the claim in The Register article. Here are a few examples:
Evaluate the following piece of online information using the Lateral Reading techniques you have learnt:
Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis (From ScienceOpen)
Please refer to the screen capture file below, in case the webpage is faulty or has been updated:
Question 2 (Self-reflection): What are your findings so far that have helped you determine its reliability/unreliability?
Spend some time to read through Our Findings on the next tab within the current box! If you have any questions or novel findings, please feel free to contact Librarian Zhenyan Li.
When we first looked at it, we could tell that it's an online record of a journal article. Before we check out the article details, such as article title, authorship, publication title and publisher, etc., we'd naturally want to look up the source ScienceOpen in the first place. Here's some helpful information for assessment:
ScienceOpen is a research discovery platform that hosts and indexes research articles from publishers and institutes. It's considered a reliable source of information. However, we would still need to investigate the research article itself since it's being "pulled" to ScienceOpen from the publisher.
Next, instead of reading the article in details (Abstract on ScienceOpen or full text from the publisher), we could do a search on the claim by copying the article title to the Google search bar and check out what the general sentiments on the claim are like.
From the Google search, we firstly found that this article had already been retracted. In fact, the publisher webpage had also been updated to "RETRACTED" with explanations.
In addition, we found a few critiques from credible news sources or fact-checking sites on the claim, for example:
So, with no doubt, the claim has been verified to be misinformation. However, the source where we encountered it, namely ScienceOpen, is a legit research discovery platform. Without further investigating on the claim, we might have been "tricked" by, for instance, the number of "cited by", reputable publisher Elsevier, and so-called affiliation with the Standford University.
Similarily, when we encounter research on other discovery platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia, it's always recommended to refer to the original publication from the publisher. From there, we can better determine the reliability of the research, e.g. was it peer-reviewed, was it published in a quality journal by a reputable publisher, etc.
Evaluate the following Facebook post (by Australian Youth Coal Coalition) using the Lateral Reading techniques you have learnt:
Question 2 (Self-reflection): What are your findings so far that have helped you determine its reliability/unreliability?
Spend some time to read through Our Findings on the next tab within the current box! If you have any questions or novel findings, please feel free to contact Librarian Zhenyan Li.
Firstly, let us look up the source/creator of the Facebook post - Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC).
Again, we checked out its Wikipedia article. It was noted that AYCC is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation. With further investigation, we found that AYCC is a registered charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission (ACNC), the national regulator of charities in Australia.
Next, we noticed that AYCC had been featured in or quoted by several credible, authoritative sources, for example:
We might conclude that based on the investigations AYCC is a reputable youth organisation in Australia and even renowned in climate movements across the globe. But, have they ever possessed own agenda in advocating climate justice through biased or misleading messaging? We may not have a clear idea, nor easily find out.
Not to worry, next we examined the claim from the AYCC Facebook post to verify its reliability. We used this search term - "trash in Hyde Park left by climate protesters". You may also add "AYCC" in your search string.
Surprisingly, the first Google Search result appearing on our screen was a fact-check result concluded by PolitiFact, which rated the claim as False and clarified that "the image is from another event celebrating 420 months earlier". There were more evidences discerning this piece of misinformation as we explored further, for example rating of Miscaptioned by Snopes.com, and debunking the viral claim with FackCheck.org which covered the full story of how this picture had gone viral online and highlighted the Facebook post by AYCC in the storyline.
With this claim turned out to be false, it was quite unexpected to find out that a reputable organisation with then 3000 Facebook followers had joined, perhaps unwittingly, the spread of viral misinformation. So, we call on everyone to brush up and apply own critical thinking and information evaluation skills and become a more critical consumer of information!