The SIFT, an acronym that stands for Stop, Investigate the Source, Find Better Coverage, and Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to their Original Context, is an evaluation strategy developed by Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert. It was developed to help you determine whether online content can be trusted for credible or reliable sources of information. Thus, this method, just like CRAAP, serves as an important tool for you which you can use while testing your resources. As you are currently aware or starting to perceive, determining if resources are credible is actually quite challenging. Thus, using this method may reduce the difficulty of the task and help you easily analyze information. While the CRAAP method is similar to this, SIFT is especially developed to help you analyze information from news or other online media, serving as an important tool not only in your research journey. Here is a further breakdown of the acronym.
As it implies, before reading or citing, you need to "stop." It's important that you take a moment to wait and think, being aware of your emotional response to the headline of the article. Headlines are often made to get as many clicks; in order to do so, they are trying to maximize what would get the reader to do so: evoke a stronger emotional response.
The next step is to essentially Investigate the Source.
Before reading, citing, or sharing the source, you should wait and make sure the source is credible. You may look up the author and source publishing the information. At this moment, you can even use CRAAP you just learned.
Among the ways to effectively investigate a source is to use something called "lateral reading." Reading laterally is basically reading across multiple connected sites instead of focusing deeply on one site.
Unlike traditional sources, like books, journals, or newspapers where readers often have prior knowledge about the source due to its origin, on the web, you may find unfamiliar sites without any context or background. While some evaluation methods, such as checking the "About" page or author biographies on the same site, are common, they sometimes are unreliable. For instance, untrustworthy sites often provide misleading information about themselves. Even worse, some trustworthy sites aim to present themselves in the best possible light, which makes it biased and not accurate.
Thus, the concept of lateral reading, introduced by Sam Wineburg's Stanford research team, was made to encourage readers to look at other authoritative sources to evaluate a site.
Professional fact-checkers evaluate new sites by the following. First, one should leave the site to see what other authoritative sources say about it. Plus, they shall open multiple browser tabs to gather information from across the web. Last, one should be searching for information about the author, ownership, and pages linking to the site. Overall, lateral reading mainly focuses on understanding the site's perspective and bias. This would thus determine if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation. Eventually, after gaining insights from other sources, lateral readers can return to engage with the original content with a better idea and evaluation. They are now able to understand whether the site's facts and analyses are trustworthy.
Another method recommended in the step of "I" is hovering: it is another technique to learn more about who is sharing information, especially on media platforms. (As mentioned, although this may apply to research, it is also more to be learned for general resources.)
This process basically involves hovering over a link to a user profile so you would be able to get more information about the source. While hovering, you may ask yourself the following questions:
Hover every time, even when you're not immediately suspicious.
What you need to do while hovering is that, at the beginning, your first step should not be to determine if the claim is true but to assess if the source is credible enough to rely on information presented there. One particularly helpful point is to check the source's area of expertise or professional background. Note that the expertise must align with the topic of the content shared. For instance, while a meteorologist commenting on Covid-19 might be accurate, their expertise isn't in virology or public health, that is why further verification is thus needed.
Speaking about this domain of social media platforms, especially ones like Twitter, or X, a reporter covering a topic in their professional capacity, with proper affiliations, can often be considered trustworthy. Also note that just because a source isn't immediately credible doesn't mean the story is false; what it means is that it just needs more verification. Hovering is a fairly simple and effective technique to assess sources this way.
The following step in SIFT is to Find Better Coverage or other sources that may or may not support the original claim. As mentioned, use lateral reading to see if you can find other sources corroborating the same information or disputing it. You may ask "What coverage is available on the topic?" You should thus be keeping track of trusted news sources.
What we are trying to do now is to "fact check." However, there are already organizations that can serve as fact checkers for us and have already looked into the claims we are trying to verify. These fact-checking organizations often provide nonpartisan, evidence-based evaluations. Nonprofit and nonpartisan platforms aim to increase public understanding of issues, assessing whether claims are factual or unsupported.