Teach & case

A case · you decide

Imara and the professional-looking health site

Imara — a student choosing a main source for a civics project from a polished, study-citing website

The idea in play: lateral reading — leave the page and check what independent sources say about it.

Imara found a health-policy site for her project. It looks professional, cites studies, and reads confidently — so it seems like a solid main source. But "looks trustworthy on the page" and "is worth trusting" are different things, and deciding between them involves judgment calls that aren't just right or wrong.

Professional fact-checkers do something most students don't: they read LATERALLY. Instead of judging a site by how it looks and what it says about itself (reading vertically, staying on the page), they open new tabs and ask what INDEPENDENT sources say about the site — who runs it, who funds it, whether others corroborate it.

Lateral reading is a technique for finding out where a claim comes from. But once you know that, the harder part is a value question: how much weight to give a source's credentials, its funding, or independent corroboration — and reasonable people, weighing real civic values, land differently.

Imara's habit is simple to state and hard to skip: leave the page and check before you trust. Lateral reading gets you the facts about a source; which sources you then rely on is a civic judgment you make in the open — not a verdict the page hands you.

Practice evaluating a source yourself →