Name the exact claim
Do not verify a mood. Write the proposition.
SOURCE REVIEW
How to Read a Claim Before Sharing It
A fast, source-aware method for stopping, checking the source, finding better coverage, tracing context, and recording uncertainty.
QUICK ANSWER
In one sentence
A fast, source-aware method for stopping, checking the source, finding better coverage, tracing context, and recording uncertainty.
THE CONTROLLING CLAIM
Sharing is publication at small scale. Leave a receipt.
The claim arrives already compressed: a screenshot, a sentence, a clip, a headline, a number with no denominator. Your finger is closer to Share than the source is to its original context. Stop. The few seconds before redistribution are part of the evidence chain now.
TRUTH BOUNDARY
This page offers a practical verification method, not a guarantee against error. Lateral reading and SIFT are useful strategies, but source credibility, domain expertise, primary evidence, and time constraints still require human evaluation.
01 — STOP BEFORE THE CLAIM BORROWS YOUR NAME
Attention is part of publication.
Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework starts with Stop: pause before reacting or circulating, notice what you know about the source, and decide what you actually need to verify. The move is almost offensively simple. That is why it matters. The information environment is built to make reaction feel cheaper than orientation.
Stopping does not mean suppressing urgent information. It means giving the claim a chance to become more than a stimulus.
02 — INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE LATERALLY
Do not ask a website to testify only about itself.
The Digital Inquiry Group’s Civic Online Reasoning work grew from observing professional fact checkers. One important strategy is lateral reading: leave the unfamiliar page and inspect what other sources say about the publisher, organization, evidence, and reputation.
A polished About page is evidence of what the publisher says about itself. It is not independent corroboration of the publisher’s authority.
03 — FIND BETTER COVERAGE
Corroboration is about independence and quality, not raw repetition.
If twenty accounts copy the same wire sentence, screenshot, press release, or anonymous post, you may still have one origin. Find reporting or documentation that adds independent observation, direct records, domain expertise, or clearer context.
Better coverage does not always mean a more famous outlet. It means coverage that improves the evidentiary position: closer to the event, clearer about methods, more transparent about sources, or capable of testing the claim.
04 — TRACE THE ORIGINAL CONTEXT
The original can rescue a claim or destroy it.
SIFT’s final move is to trace quotes, claims, and media back toward original context. The earliest source is not automatically the best source, but tracing shows what changed during transmission: wording, crop, date, denominator, qualification, or attribution.
A screenshot of a sentence may be genuine and still misleading because the sentence was conditional, hypothetical, superseded, translated badly, or detached from the data it summarized.
05 — THE NINE-MOVE SHARE TEST
Make sharing answer a few questions first.
Identify the source
Who created this specific artifact?
Check date and context
Is it current, recycled, cropped, or superseded?
Read laterally
What do independent sources say about the publisher and claim?
Find better coverage
Look for stronger evidence, not more copies.
Trace upstream
Find the record, study, transcript, filing, dataset, or original media where possible.
Separate fact from inference
What is directly documented and what is interpretation?
Record unknowns
What is still missing?
Then decide whether to share
Urgency changes timing, not the need to label uncertainty.
COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS
Keep the argument capable of surviving disagreement.
- Fast verification methods can miss domain-specific evidence that requires deep expertise or primary-source analysis.
- Lateral reading can reproduce consensus errors if all secondary sources depend on the same mistaken origin.
- Primary sources can mislead, omit, or manipulate; tracing to an origin is not the same as proving the origin truthful.
UNKNOWNS
What this article does not settle.
- The amount of verification justified before sharing depends on consequence, urgency, and claim type.
- Some breaking events do not yet have independent corroboration; the correct output may be “unverified,” not silence or certainty.
- Automated tools can help find context but can also reproduce the same unsupported claim.
SOURCE TRAIL
Follow the record.
RELATED READING
CORRECTION RECEIPT
Editorial clarification, 2026-08-31: the truth boundary now says that source review under constraint requires human evaluation rather than judgment. The proposition, sources, confidence, and evidence weights did not change. See MFTAC-LEDGER-PUB-014.
DO NOT SHARE THE HEAT AND CALL IT LIGHT.