Veteran public radio journalist, Julie Rose, urged Education Week attendees to follow a modal, known as SIFT, to combat against misinformation in a flood of media in the current digital age.
Rose is a longtime radio journalist with over 20 years of experience and now hosts BYU Radio podcast, "Top of Mind." During the class, she walked attendees through her methods of verifying, debunking and reflecting viral information all across social media.
"I want to give you tools you can use every day," Rose said to the class. "When something pops up in your feed and sparks a strong emotion, that's when you need to pause and ask, is this really true?"
Rose walked attendees through the "SIFT" model, developed by Mike Caulfield, to verify information in their feed.
- Stop (and reflect)
- Investigate the source
- Find better coverage
- Trace claims back to their original context
Stop and reflect
Rose explained that the tendency to believe in a story before reflection is reinforced through preexisting beliefs. "It must be true ... and especially if it aligns with our world view, then we're gonna believe it," she said.
She explained that misinformation often works because it triggers an emotional reaction. She warns that confirmation bias, believing what aligns with one's worldview, makes false stories all more convicing.
Investigate the source
Rose applied this step to a viral post from Real Raw News about a detainee killed by an alligator in Florida. Despite appearances, when investigating the source with the class, she found that the about had a disclaimer stating: "This website contains humor, parody and satire," and that the information on the site was for entertainment purposes.
She added in interview that misleading stories often "look super legit, and actually not be ... if it looks like a legitimate news article, we're inclined to want to believe that it is."
Find better coverage
Rose did a Google search to find other coverage and to verify the credibility of the prior news source; she found that there was no inmate eaten by an alligator in Florida and the Real Raw News was the original source for the story.
"If somebody got to eaten by an alligator, don't you think there would be a story that would show up here somewhere?" Rose asked.
Trace claims back to their original source
To emphasize this step, Rose demonstrated to the class how to do a reverse image search to determine the authenticity of a photo. She used a popular AI-generated image of "Alligator Alcatraz" to show the class how to figure out if an image is fake or what the original context was.
"You can't trust your eyes when it comes to video," she said. "People are making up fake pictures and grabbing video out of context."
Below is a tutorial on how to reverse image search through Google using an AI-generated image of Alligator Alcatraz posted on X:
Build your own literacy
Rose admitted that she learned her lessons "from the school of hard knocks, by wasting time and getting duped." However, through practice, she found that her media literacy improved.
"The more you do it, the faster you get at it," she said. "And then the better able you are to do what my podcasts are all about, which is trying to help people be better citizens and kinder neighbors, and more effective at advocating for what they care about."
The main takeaway she wanted her attendees to walk away with was to stop and think before sharing.
At the end of her presentation, she gave a list of sources to use to fact-check information: