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FYSM 1100

SIFT Method of Evaluation

Created by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, SIFT is a method for evaluating online content. It's a set of actions you should take and questions you should ask yourself to establish context, and sort fact from fiction.

To help you find the context you need to make decisions about the content you're finding on the internet, Caulfield created a list of four things to do using the acronym SIFT.

Click on the S I F T tabs above to learn more about each step. View the SIFT library guide for more information.

Stop

Do you recognize the website/author that's sharing the information?

Do you trust them? Do they have a reputation?

What is your purpose in using this information? Are you just looking for an interesting story or are you looking for something to use in a class assignment?

If you don't know, before you continue reading or share the information, use the other moves to help get a sense of what you're looking at.

Investigate the Source

What are you looking at? Is it a news story, social media post, article or webpage?

What can you find out about the author?

What can you find out about the website?

Try using lateral reading to answer these questions. Instead of scrolling up and down, reading everything you can on the page, leave the website and open multiple tabs to look up information about the source's credibility and what others are saying about the reliability of the content being shared. You can even try using Wikipedia to find more information about the author/publisher, website, and claims from your online source.

Find Better Coverage

Sometimes you may come across a source you can't verify or you just want to know if what you read is true. 

Try searching online to see if you can find other more reputable sources that are also reporting something similar to what you found.

Use a fact checking website like Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org to see if professional fact checkers have already investigated the information you've found.

Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context

Much of what appears on the internet has been stripped of context. As information is shared across different platforms by a variety of people, it can be harder to determine its validity. It's important to see the information it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

Scroll through the webpage you're looking at to see if there are any clues that this information was shared from somewhere else.

Check for links that bring you to the original content.

See if you can find a date that specifies when this information was shared.

Sometimes you may need to find the origin of an image. Try doing a reverse image search using Google's image search tool or a website like TinEye.