Within Sharper Thinking
How to Check a Claim Online
Lateral reading checks what other sources say about a site or claim instead of judging one page by appearance.
On this page
- Why polished pages can mislead
- Opening other sources before trusting one site
- A quick lateral reading checklist
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Introduction
Lateral reading is a practical way to check whether a website, source or online claim deserves your trust: instead of judging one page by how professional it looks, you leave it, open other tabs, and find out what independent sources say about it. It matters because polished design, official-sounding names and confident writing are easy to fake. Professional fact-checkers have been found to use this “read around the source” habit far more effectively than students and even subject experts who stay on the original page and inspect it from top to bottom. [Misinformation Review]misinforeview.hks.harvard.eduMisinformation ReviewLateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course | HKS Misinforma…
The point is not to distrust everything. It is to slow down at the right moment, shift attention from appearance to provenance, and ask better questions: Who is behind this? Are they in a position to know? What do other credible sources say? Used well, lateral reading is one of the most transferable thinking skills for life online because it turns web credibility from a matter of instinct into a repeatable check. [UMD College of Education]education.umd.eduUMD College of EducationLateral Reading: The New Way to Assess Online Information that Your Teachers Never Taught You | UMD College of Ed…
Why polished pages can mislead
A website can look authoritative while hiding weak evidence, partisan funding, commercial incentives or a misleading source chain. Traditional “vertical” evaluation asks readers to stay on the page and inspect its visible features: the domain name, the About page, the writing style, the date, the author biography, the references and the general presentation. Those checks are not useless, but they are vulnerable to manipulation. A bad actor can buy a clean template, write a sober mission statement, add respectable-looking logos, and make an advocacy site look like a neutral institute.
That is the core weakness lateral reading addresses. The Stanford-linked research behind the term compared professional fact-checkers with PhD historians and Stanford undergraduates. The fact-checkers did not spend long admiring or dissecting the target page. After a quick scan, they opened other tabs to investigate the organisation, its backers and how the broader web described it. The historians and students were more likely to remain on the original site, where official-looking names, internal links and polished design could pull them into the site’s own frame. [Hendrix College]hendrix.eduCollegereading less and learning more when evaluating digitalCollegereading less and learning more when evaluating digital
This is a useful lesson for analytical thinking more broadly. A source is not credible because it looks calm, uses footnotes, or says it is independent. Credibility depends on a relationship between the claim, the source’s expertise, the source’s incentives, the quality of evidence, and what better-positioned sources say. Lateral reading changes the first move from “Do I like this page?” to “What is this page, and who says so besides itself?” [Inquiry Group]cor.inquirygroup.orgInquiry Group Teaching Lateral Reading | CORInquiry Group Teaching Lateral Reading | COR
Opening other sources before trusting one site
The simplest version of lateral reading is to leave the original page almost immediately. Search for the name of the site, author, publisher or organisation in a new tab. Add terms such as “funding”, “ownership”, “criticism”, “fact check”, “about”, “bias”, “controversy” or the name of the claim. Then compare what you find across sources that have some reason to know: reputable news organisations, academic institutions, official records, established reference works, primary documents, specialist databases or recognised fact-checking bodies.
This does not mean counting search results as votes. Ten low-quality blogs repeating the same rumour are not stronger than one well-sourced investigation. The aim is to locate independent, better-grounded context. For a medical claim, that might mean a public health body, a peer-reviewed review or a known medical institution. For a political funding question, it might mean campaign finance records, company filings, charity registers or reputable investigative journalism. For a viral image, it might mean reverse image search, archived pages and the earliest traceable upload.
The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum frames lateral reading as checking what other digital sources say about a site rather than trusting what the site says about itself. Its classroom materials explicitly contrast lateral reading with vertical reading, where a reader stays on one page and relies on internal signals. [Inquiry Group]cor.inquirygroup.orgInquiry Group Teaching Lateral Reading | CORInquiry Group Teaching Lateral Reading | COR The House of Commons Library similarly describes lateral reading as leaving the source being evaluated to look elsewhere for information about it, such as searching for authors or organisations beyond the original webpage. [House of Commons Library]commonslibrary.parliament.ukHouse of Commons Library How to evaluate sourcesHouse of Commons Library How to evaluate sources
A useful mental model is: the first page makes the claim; the next tabs help you decide how much attention the first page deserves. This is especially important when a page is designed to trigger a strong emotional response. Sarah McGrew, whose work focuses on online source evaluation, recommends noticing emotional reactions as a cue to pause, leave the original source, practise “click restraint” on search results, and then assess whether the source is in a position to know and whether it has motives to mislead. [UMD College of Education]education.umd.eduUMD College of EducationLateral Reading: The New Way to Assess Online Information that Your Teachers Never Taught You | UMD College of Ed…
What the research suggests about teaching it
Lateral reading is not just a slogan; it has been tested as an instructional intervention. A Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review study examined whether college students could improve their online source evaluation through an asynchronous course. The intervention was built from strategies observed among professional fact-checkers and woven into a nutrition class. Students showed statistically significant improvement from pretest to posttest, and they used lateral reading more often after instruction. [Misinformation Review]misinforeview.hks.harvard.eduMisinformation ReviewLateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course | HKS Misinforma…
A separate district-wide field study in high school government classes tested a classroom intervention in which teachers received professional development and then taught six 50-minute lessons. Students practised leaving unfamiliar websites to search the open web before investing attention in the source. The study is important because it moved beyond a small lab task: it tested whether lateral-reading instruction could be implemented through ordinary teachers in a real school district. [Ovid]ovid.comLateral Reading on the Open Internet: Journal of Educational PsychologyLateral Reading on the Open Internet: Journal of Educational Psychology
The evidence also clarifies what “improving thinking” looks like in practice. Students do not become better evaluators simply by being told to “be critical”. They improve when they are shown a concrete move, practise it on real web material, and receive feedback. That is why lateral reading is a strong example of a thinking skill with an implementation pathway: it turns a vague virtue, scepticism, into a visible action sequence.
The danger of “just searching it”
Lateral reading is not the same as typing a headline into a search engine and believing whatever appears first. Recent research complicates the simple advice to “look it up”. A 2024 Nature study found that online searches to evaluate misinformation can sometimes increase belief in false information, especially when search results lead people into “data voids” filled with low-quality corroborating sources. The authors warn that media literacy advice should be grounded in tested strategies, not the assumption that any search is automatically corrective. [Nature]nature.comOpen source on nature.com.
This matters because poor lateral reading can become disguised confirmation bias. If someone copies a misleading headline into search and clicks the first pages that repeat it, they may return more confident and less accurate. Better lateral reading uses source-aware search: search for the publisher, author, funding, original evidence and independent coverage, not just the claim’s most emotionally loaded wording.
A good search result page should be read before it is clicked. “Click restraint” means pausing over the results, scanning domains and snippets, and choosing sources that are likely to have knowledge or accountability rather than simply choosing the highest-ranked or most agreeable item. McGrew’s advice to look for recognisable, varied and credible sources is especially useful when a topic is political, commercial or emotionally charged. [UMD College of Education]education.umd.eduUMD College of EducationLateral Reading: The New Way to Assess Online Information that Your Teachers Never Taught You | UMD College of Ed…
A quick lateral-reading checklist
Use this when a claim, article, post or website feels important enough to influence what you believe, share, buy, vote for or repeat.
- Stop before engaging deeply. Do not reward a suspicious page with several minutes of close reading before you know what it is. Pause especially when the claim makes you angry, relieved, frightened or smug.
- Identify the source, not just the content. Search the site name, author, publisher or organisation in a new tab. Look for ownership, funding, expertise, track record and whether others describe it as advocacy, satire, propaganda, marketing, journalism, research or something else.
- Check what better-positioned sources say. Find independent coverage from sources with relevant expertise or accountability. For science and health claims, prefer scientific reviews and public health institutions. For public affairs, look for official records, reputable reporting and primary documents where available.
- Trace the claim back. If many sites repeat the same sentence, find where it first came from. A statistic may come from a press release, a preprint, an old report, a misread chart or a quote taken out of context.
- Compare before concluding. Ask whether credible sources agree on the basic facts, whether disagreement is about interpretation, and whether the original source left out important context.
- Return to the first page with a judgement. Decide whether to trust it, distrust it, use it cautiously, or ignore it. The result does not have to be a simple true-or-false verdict; often the best answer is “this source is not reliable enough for this claim”.
Where lateral reading fits in better thinking
Lateral reading strengthens analytical thinking because it fights three common weaknesses: judging by surface cues, trusting confidence as evidence, and stopping once a page confirms what you already wanted to believe. It makes reasoning more visible. Instead of saying “this looks credible”, you can say “this organisation is funded by X, other credible sources describe it as Y, and the original evidence does or does not support the claim.”
It also teaches proportion. Not every online claim needs a full investigation. If the stakes are low, a quick source check may be enough. If the stakes are high, such as health, finance, law, voting, safety or reputation, lateral reading should become more deliberate and evidence-based. The skill is knowing when to move from casual browsing to verification.
The deeper habit is humility about first impressions. The web rewards speed, confidence and emotional reaction; lateral reading rewards context, patience and comparison. That makes it more than a media-literacy trick. It is a small, repeatable intervention for better judgement: leave the page, widen the frame, and let the wider evidence decide how much trust the original source has earned.
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Endnotes
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Source: misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
Link: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/lateral-reading-college-students-learn-to-critically-evaluate-internet-sources-in-an-online-course/Source snippet
Misinformation ReviewLateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course | HKS Misinforma...
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Source: education.umd.edu
Link: https://education.umd.edu/news/10-28-24-lateral-reading-new-way-assess-online-information-your-teachers-never-taught-youSource snippet
UMD College of EducationLateral Reading: The New Way to Assess Online Information that Your Teachers Never Taught You | UMD College of Ed...
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Source: hendrix.edu
Title: Collegereading less and learning more when evaluating digital
Link: https://www.hendrix.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/Faculty_Resources/Teaching_and_Learning/EvaluatingDigitalInformation.pdf -
Source: ovid.com
Title: Lateral Reading on the Open Internet: Journal of Educational Psychology
Link: https://www.ovid.com/journals/jedup/fulltext/10.1037/edu0000740~lateral-reading-on-the-open-internet-a-district-wide-field -
Source: nature.com
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06883-y -
Source: ed.stanford.edu
Title: it doesn t take long learn how spot misinformation online stanford study finds
Link: https://ed.stanford.edu/news/it-doesn-t-take-long-learn-how-spot-misinformation-online-stanford-study-finds -
Source: news.stanford.edu
Title: judging fact fiction online
Link: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/10/judging-fact-fiction-online -
Source: news.stanford.edu
Title: fact checkers outperform historians evaluating online information
Link: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/10/fact-checkers-outperform-historians-evaluating-online-information -
Source: stacks.stanford.edu
Title: Wineburg Mc Grew Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise
Link: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid%3Ayk133ht8603/Wineburg%20McGrew_Lateral%20Reading%20and%20the%20Nature%20of%20Expertise.pdf -
Source: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu
Title: online searches evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity 0
Link: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/online-searches-evaluate-misinformation-can-increase-its-perceived-veracity-0 -
Source: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu
Title: online searches evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity 0
Link: https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/online-searches-evaluate-misinformation-can-increase-its-perceived-veracity-0 -
Source: misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
Title: breakstone lateral reading online course 20210223
Link: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/breakstone_lateral_reading_online_course_20210223.pdf -
Source: misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
Link: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/measuring-what-matters-investigating-what-new-types-of-assessments-reveal-about-students-online-source-evaluations/ -
Source: dash.harvard.edu
Link: https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/adbef840-9142-4a9c-8347-acb7962dcd03 -
Source: lateral.io
Link: https://www.lateral.io/ -
Source: cor.inquirygroup.org
Title: Inquiry Group Teaching Lateral Reading | COR
Link: https://cor.inquirygroup.org/curriculum/collections/teaching-lateral-reading/ -
Source: commonslibrary.parliament.uk
Title: House of Commons Library How to evaluate sources
Link: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10822/ -
Source: cor.inquirygroup.org
Link: https://cor.inquirygroup.org/ -
Source: cor.inquirygroup.org
Title: college students learn to evaluate internet sources
Link: https://cor.inquirygroup.org/research/college-students-learn-to-evaluate-internet-sources/ -
Source: researchguides.ben.edu
Title: source evaluation
Link: https://researchguides.ben.edu/source-evaluation -
Source: scienceofboosting.org
Title: Lateral Reading
Link: https://www.scienceofboosting.org/project/lateral-reading/ -
Source: committees.parliament.uk
Link: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/448/html/ -
Source: libguides.cmich.edu
Link: https://libguides.cmich.edu/web_research/lateral -
Source: openlearninglibrary.mit.edu
Link: https://openlearninglibrary.mit.edu/courses/course-v1%3AMITx%2B0.504x%2B3T2020/about
Additional References
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Source: youtube.com
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcfDKKbBobESource snippet
Hari Sreenivasan on How to Use Lateral Reading for Fact-Checking...
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Source: youtube.com
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoQG6Tin-1ESource snippet
Intro to Lateral Reading - Teaching Online Fact-Checking...
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Source: youtube.com
Title: Intro to Lateral Reading
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1IzVljNAwSource snippet
Joel Breakstone (Stanford History Education Group) | Lateral Reading on the Open Internet...
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Source: youtube.com
Title: Hari Sreenivasan on How to Use Lateral Reading for Fact-Checking
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUVRcgnOvfgSource snippet
Lateral Reading: Detecting Online Sources You Can Trust...
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Source: researchgate.net
Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349535570_Lateral_reading_College_students_learn_to_critically_evaluate_internet_sources_in_an_online_course -
Source: researchgate.net
Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356330143_Lateral_Reading_and_the_Nature_of_Expertise_Reading_Less_and_Learning_More_When_Evaluating_Digital_Information -
Source: coachingforleaders.com
Link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/prevent-being-duped-mike-caulfield/ -
Source: inoculation.science
Link: https://inoculation.science/boosting-interventions/ -
Source: kaslett.github.io
Link: https://kaslett.github.io/Documents/Do_Your_Own_Research_Aslett_et_al.pdf -
Source: scribd.com
Link: https://www.scribd.com/document/917966170/Lateral-Reading-on-the-Open-Internet-A-District-Wide-Field-Study-in-High-School-Government-Classes
Topic Tree
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Parent topic
Sharper ThinkingRelated pages 29
- Click Restraint Why the first search result is not enough
- Polished Sites Why polished websites can fool careful readers
- Search Backfire When looking it up makes misinformation stronger
- Teaching It Can students learn to read laterally?
- Viral Claims Pause before sharing emotional viral claims
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