The Stanford History Education Group has conducted research on students’ ability to recognize fake news. We’ll learn more about their research later, but by studying these students’ source evaluation strategies, the Stanford group has identified common strategies for evaluating information that do not work.

Don’t Trust These So-called Hallmarks of Credibility

Domain

Is a .org more trustworthy than a .com? Not necessarily! Any organization can register a .org website. There is no purity test for non-profit organizations. Take the Oath Keepers (oathkeeprs.org), a radical anti-government extremist group that stormed the Capitol on January 6, or the Nation of Islam (noi.org), a religious Black Nationalist organization that has been identified as a hate group. On the other hand, many trustworthy sites are .coms. Take the New York Times (nytimes.com) or the scholarly journal Media, Culture & Society (journals.sagepub.com/home/mcs). These are reputable information sources that, yes, have commercial domains.

About Page

Think about the way your friends curate their social media profiles. They’re projecting the image they want to project. The same is true of "about" pages. These are written by the authors of the website and can be used to spin rather than to inform. You might find useful information here, but you’ll probably waste your time trying read between the lines.

Links

Sources matter. Naturally, you want sources that reference other reputable sources. But here’s the thing: the creator of any webpage knows that! So, that super professional webpage with an important sounding name links to a research study. But does the research study actually support their claim? The creators of webpages can count on many readers not to check sources thoroughly, so they link to authoritative sites that do nothing to support their claims. If you just glance at the links to see if they look good, you’ll never know if the content is accurately represented.

Aesthetics

These days, anybody can create (or pay for someone else to create) a slick website. Don’t rely on the professional look or feel of a website to judge its credibility.