Digital Navigator
One process, seven steps, run on one specific thing you are unsure about. It takes a few minutes and works on a news story, a forwarded message, an image, or a chatbot answer.
When to use it
Not on everything. Most of what passes in front of you does not need a verdict, and applying a seven-step process to your whole feed is neither possible nor useful.
Use it when one of three things is true:
- You are about to share, forward, or repeat something.
- You are about to act on it, including deciding not to do something.
- Someone you trust is relying on your judgment about it.
Those are the cases where the cost of being wrong falls on someone other than you, which is the only reliable trigger for spending a few minutes.
How to run it
Work through the steps in order and stop as soon as one of them settles the question. Many items resolve at step two or three, and there is no benefit in completing the remaining steps once you have an answer.
Each step has a stopping note describing what to do when that step gives you a clear result.
The seven steps
State the claim
What exactly is being asserted?
Write it in one sentence with a subject, an action, a scope, and a time. If you cannot state it in one sentence, you are dealing with several loosely connected claims, and they need to be separated before anything else is useful.
Stopping note: If the claim cannot be stated precisely, stop here. There is nothing to check yet.
Find the origin
Where did this first appear?
Not the account that showed it to you. The origin. Follow it back through forwards, screenshots, and quote cards until you reach something with a publisher and a date, or until the trail ends.
Stopping note: A trail that ends at a screenshot is a finding. It means you have no source, not that you have a weak one.
Date it
When did this happen, and when was it published?
Old material recirculating as current is among the most common forms of misleading content, and it requires no manipulation at all. Check the publication date and, separately, the date of the events described.
Stopping note: If the material predates the situation it is being applied to, you are done.
Check who is behind it
What do independent sources say about this publisher?
Leave the page. Search the publisher name with a neutral term such as founded or funding. You are looking for what someone other than the publisher says about them: a registry entry, coverage, an academic reference.
Stopping note: Almost no independent footprint does not prove bad faith. It means you cannot treat the source as established.
Trace the specific evidence
Does the cited source exist, say this, and cover this scope?
If a study, document, or dataset is cited, open it. Check three things in order: that it exists, that it says what is claimed, and that its scope matches the use being made of it. Most misleading material fails at the third.
Stopping note: A real source used outside its scope is the most common failure and the easiest to miss.
Ask what else would exist
If this were true, what else would I expect to find?
A public statement has a recording. A regulatory action has a filing. A major event has several independent outlets covering it. A weather event has satellite data. Look for the surrounding record, not just more copies of the claim.
Stopping note: Count independent origins, not posts. Twenty accounts repeating one source is one source.
Set your confidence and decide
How sure am I, on what basis, and what would change it?
State your position in a sentence with the reason attached, and name one observation that would change your mind. Then decide what to do, scaling your standard to the consequences of being wrong.
Stopping note: "I do not know" is a complete and often correct outcome. It is also a shareable one: saying you could not find the source is a useful contribution.
What the Navigator does not do
It does not settle contested questions where the evidence itself is disputed by informed people. It will tell you that a question is contested, what the strongest available evidence is, and what would resolve it, which is a genuinely useful result and is not the same as an answer.
It also does not detect AI-generated content by inspection, and it deliberately does not ask you to. Detection tools produce both false accusations and false reassurance. Steps two, five, and six do the work instead, by asking where something came from and what else would exist if it were real. TheAI content verification checklistcovers this in detail.
Take it with you
For a shorter version to use at the moment of sharing, print theseven questions before you sharechecklist. For a structured version of step four, use thesource evaluation worksheet.
To practise the individual steps, the Think Lab has an exercise for most of them.