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Fullerton College Library

How to Know What to Trust: Evaluating Information: Video Tutorials

Check Yourself with Lateral Reading

How to Find the Original Reporting Source

This 1.5-minute video will show you how to go upstream to locate the original source of a claim.

Using Wikipedia to Assess Sources

This 4.5-minute video will show you how to use Wikipedia to determine the trustworthiness of a claim.

How to Investigate the Authority of a Source

This 15-minute video will show you how to leave a source to decide if it's a good source.

Advanced Claim Check

When evidence is not provided, search the web to see what other sources have to say about the claim. Mike Caulfield will show you how.

Image Search It

Investigate an image to see if it has been tampered with by dropping it into TinEye, Google Images, or Berify. Skip to 6:17 in this Crash Course video for a quick demo on how to reverse search an image to: 1) check the types of sites that have also used this image, including fact-checking sites and 2) see if the image has been cropped or in any other way altered to change its context.

To reverse search videos, take a screenshot of a distinct moment in the video and run it through the same sites above.

Good, Bad, and Irrelevant Evidence

John Green shows you how to tell good evidence from bad evidence and maybe importantly, how to identify “Fine, but that doesn’t actually prove your point” evidence - the stuff that the Internet is built on.

Common Error in Reasoning: False Cause

Is the author confusing correlation for causation? The sun rises after the rooster crows, but the rooster does not cause the sun to rise. In other words, just because B happened immediately after A doesn't mean that A caused B to happen.

Common Error in Reasoning: Single Cause

Is the author oversimplifying a cause-and-effect relationship? There are often multiple factors that influence an outcome, not just one.

More on the problem with hasty generalizations

This brief video discusses the problem with basing conclusions or claims on too little a sample size.

Errors in Reasoning

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Developed by Artists for Education 

Data & Infographics Don't Lie... Or Do They?

This video will show you how to think critically about the statistics you encounter in everyday life.

How to Spot Misleading Graphs

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