We’re all moving targets when it comes to information aimed straight at us, whether the darts headed our way are text messages, social media posts, photos, emails, longer written pieces, games, GIFs or videos. Savvy citizens of the internet know to start with one question when something whose creator they don’t know hits their screen: What is the main purpose of this information?

Especially if you first think is that what you’re seeing is news, think harder: Is it intended mainly to entertain you? Sell you something? Persuade you of something? Provoke you? Or is it information presented to document or inform? As the “InfoZones” lesson in our Checkology® virtual classroom explains, understanding the following categories of information helps you know how to process what’s coming at you:

• News: Informs you, through objective reporting, about local, national and international events, issues and people of significance or of interest.

• Opinion: Persuades you, ideally through the use of fact-based evidence, to adopt a specific point of view about an issue or event.

• Advertising: Sells you a product or service.

• Entertainment: Amuses, pleases, relaxes or distracts you.

• Propaganda: Provokes you — often by using false or distorted information to manipulate your emotions.

• Raw information: Documents an event or trend. It has not been analyzed, checked, edited, explained or placed in any context.

There’s nothing wrong with going online to be entertained or amazed. But to avoid being unwittingly zinged by something that you assume is verified news but is, rather, an ad or unedited video, start with this healthy question: “What is the primary objective or purpose of this piece of information?”

Once you’ve answered that, you’re prepared for what comes your way. Whether you laugh, shout, buy or cry, you’ll be in charge of your reaction — and you won’t end up spreading what you thought was truth but instead was something taken out of context or designed to manipulate.

What do you do when you encounter information that leaves you scratching your head — wondering whether it’s a credible news report, a subtly disguised advertisement or a provocative piece of propaganda?

If you simply go down the rabbit hole of the site that posted or created it, you likely won’t get the clarity or context you need to make an informed decision.

So instead of going deep, go wide: Employ lateral reading.

“In brief, lateral reading (as opposed to vertical reading) is the act of verifying what you’re reading as you’re reading it,” writes Terry Heick in “This Is The Future And Reading Is Different Than You Remember” on TeachThought.com, a website featuring innovations in education. The lateral reading concept and the term itself developed from research conducted by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), led by Sam Wineburg, founder and executive director of SHEG.

Lateral reading helps you determine an author’s credibility, intent and biases by searching for articles on the same topic by other writers (to see how they are covering it) and for other articles by the author you’re checking on. That’s what professional fact-checkers do.

Questions you’ll want to ask include these:

• Who funds or sponsors the site where the original piece was published? What do other authoritative sources have to say about that site?

• When you do a search on the topic of the original piece, are the initial results from fact-checking organizations?

• Have questions been raised about other articles the author has written?

• Does what you’re finding elsewhere contradict the original piece?

• Are credible news outlets reporting on (or perhaps more important, not reporting on) what you’re reading?

The book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers sums it up this way in the chapter “What ‘Reading Laterally’ Means”:  “Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site’s analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site’s facts.”

If other reliable sources confirm what you’re reading, you can feel confident about its credibility.

“This is not equal to that” is how one writer summarizes the logical fallacy known as false equivalence. 

As the name suggests, false equivalence is a cognitive bias by which events, ideas or situations are compared as if they are the same when the differences are substantial. Those differences can be either in quantity or quality. This form of flawed reasoning can sneak into conversations, and it can show up in news coverage, too. 

Here’s an example of false equivalence:

Yes, Mr. Smith is a serial embezzler, but Mr. Jones once littered in the park. Both are criminals!

This is a qualitative difference in which two acts are compared as if they’re equivalent. While each could be considered dishonorable, one clearly is worse than the other. 

Here’s another example, this one from Checkology’s Arguments & Evidence lesson. This lesson offers a fictional situation in which a boy posts a photo of a test question on social media, and as a result, the testing company decides to invalidate all students’ tests. A student complains:  

A teacher doesn’t punish a whole class when one student cheats! Why should this testing company punish every kid in America?!

While there is an apparent similarity between two things, important differences are ignored. That argument doesn’t compare apples to apples. A more reasonable comparison would be a teacher invalidating a class test because one student shared a test question with the entire class.

News reports can be guilty of false equivalence when two sides of an issue are cited as if they were equal. Consider climate change. Today, scientific consensus is that the planet is warming, and that human activities are the cause. Yet, as a 2014 column in Columbia Journalism Review points out, sometimes “false balance” has journalists “presenting the science as something still under debate.”

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” one canine tells another in one of The New Yorker’s most famous cartoons. That was 1993. Today, the saying could be: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a bot” — except for those exceptional users who are news-literate and savvy to the ways of bots. (But watch out. Bots can be sneaky.)

Not all bots are awful. They are programs that carry out automatic tasks: the worker bees of the internet, as a piece in The Atlantic put it. Some refresh your Facebook feed. When you visit an online merchant and a tiny figure pops up in the corner of your screen (hi there, chatbot!) asking how he or she … uh, it … can help, that’s a bot.

But beware of bots gone bad. In 2018, those gremlins made up some 20% of web traffic, according to a report by Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company. “Bad bots” are used to publish and spread misinformation. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Southern California referred to the scourge as “social hacking,” as bots spread “negative content aimed at polarizing highly influential human users to exacerbate social conflict.”

Data for Democracy (“a worldwide community of passionate volunteers working together to promote trust and understanding in data and technology”) presents pointers for how to know what’s a bot, so you can avoid being socially hacked. Among traits to look out for are accounts that:

• Post at all hours of the day and night. “Continual round-the-clock activity is a sure-fire sign of somemeasure of automation.”

• Retweet a lot. “Accounts that are exclusively retweets (or pretty close) aren’t always bots, but if they exhibit some of the other traits here, there’s a good chance they are.”

• Use identical language as others. Coordinated content is the sign of a campaign to sow disinformation.

If it posts constantly like a bot, retweets like a bot and uses language like a bot … it probably is a bot. Don’t be caught by it, and don’t spread its messages to others!

Plenty of people have go-to news sources. But what happens when you stumble across a site that looks legitimate? What if you’ve never heard of it? How do you know if the news organization behind it is real or a spoof? How can you tell whether it has financial or political ties that will tilt its coverage?

The fastest way to determine if a site might not be an honest purveyor of news is to look at the web address. People trying to make a quick buck often buy domains similar to those of well-known news organizations and add .co to the end, or use neutral names that hide their shady nature.

Equally important is the way the site describes itself and its work. Look for words that imply a nonpartisan search for facts. For example, The Washington Post introduces its “Policies and Standards” (in the About Us section) with its mission statement. (“The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.”) The investigative site ProPublica calls itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom.”

Don’t let kidders kid you

By contrast, click the “About” tab on The Onion, where it calls itself “the world’s leading news publication.” It also makes comically exaggerated claims that should tip you off that it’s not a real news site. Consider this gem. “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.”

You can learn more about this serious topic and related issues in the podcast episode These Kids Don’t Play: Anxiety About Bias in the Media. Part of the podcast series Inside the Chrysalis, it features NLP’s  Senior Vice President of Education Peter Adams.

And remember, even journalists have fallen for hoax sites — proving it’s always good to apply news literacy skills to what you see and hear.

While many dither about the meaning (or lack of meaning) of the phrase “fake news,” for the purposes of her 2018 paper “Both Facts and Feelings: Emotion and News Literacy,” Susan Currie Sivek is clear: It “truly has primarily a manipulative intent and may deviate from factual accuracy to achieve that goal.”

“Unlike the objective tone sought by most mainstream journalists,” she writes, “creators of fake news typically seek to strike an emotional chord that will spur audiences to react and to share the fake content.”

Sivek, chair of the journalism and media studies department at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, then lays out her concern: Technology is now a part of the scourge of people trying to appeal to emotions rather than intellect, as algorithms and apps use our personal data to recognize (and respond to) what we’re feeling and when we’re feeling it. She says: “Our emotional capacities appear freshly vulnerable to external influence in this new technological context.”

She wants us to recognize why, and how, we’re feeling angry — and to know how to handle it.

When we go online, she writes, two issues arise: We’re increasingly observed by “emotion analytics” — the hardware and software on our devices that can respond to our emotional states — and, as ever, we take mental shortcuts to make decisions.

One way to sharpen critical thinking, of course, is by improving news literacy skills. Thanks to the News Literacy Project’s efforts, and others’, she notes, growing numbers of readers, viewers and listeners are at least aware of the many clever ways that trolls, extreme partisan groups, internet subcultures and even — in a more benign way — advertisers are out to hijack our attention and emotions.

Her suggestions? Slow down before sharing, and learn the details of the devices (including digital home assistants) that are collecting information about you. But above all, she advises, be mindful of where you’re encountering news and how you’re reacting to it: That can go a long way to keep you from being motivated by hot emotions — especially when those emotions are exactly what the “fake news” purveyors want.