38 Scientific American, February 2022
undergraduates evaluated Web sites and information
on social and political issues. They found that whereas
historians and students were often fooled by manip-
ulative Web sites, journalism fact-checkers were not.
In addition, their methods of analysis differed signif-
icantly: historians and students tried to assess the
validity of Web sites and information by reading ver-
tically, navigating within a site to learn more about it,
but fact-checkers read laterally, opening new browser
tabs for different sources and running searches to
judge the original Web site’s credibility.
Working with the Poynter Institute and the Local
Media Association and with support from Google.org
(a charity founded by the technology giant), Wineburg
and his team have created a civic online reasoning
course that teaches students to evaluate information
by reading laterally. The effects so far look promising.
In a field experiment involving 40,000 high school
students in urban public health districts, Wineburg
and his group found that students who took the class
became better able to evaluate Web sites and the cred-
ibility of online claims, such as Facebook posts, com-
pared with students who did not take the class.S
till, even if news literAcy educAtion
teaches specific skills well, some researchers
question its broader, longer-term impact. Once
students learn how to evaluate Web sites and claims,
how confident can we be that they will retain these
skills and use them down the line? How sure can we
be that these methods will inculcate students with
skepticism about conspiracy theories and disinfor-
mation campaigns? And will these methods lead stu-
dents to become civically engaged members of soci-
ety? “There’s always this kind of leap into ‘that will
make our democracy and news systems stronger.’
And I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case,” Miha-
ilidis says.
Some research does hint that news literacy ap -
proaches could have these broader beneficial effects.
In a 2017 study of 397 adults, researchers found that
people who were more media-literate were less likely
to endorse conspiracy theories compared with peo-
ple who were less media-literate. “We can’t definitely
say news literacy causes you to reject conspiracy the-
ories, but the fact that we see a positive relationship
there tells us there’s something to this that we need