Lesson
How Images Lose Their Original Context
Recontextualized photographs mislead more often than manipulated ones. Here is how it happens and how to trace an image back to its origin.
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All lessons
Every lesson published so far, in one place. Each one has a stated learning objective, a worked example, a practical exercise, and a summary checklist.
Lessons are the core instructional material on this site. They are written to be read once and used repeatedly, so each one ends with a checklist you can apply without rereading the explanation.
If you would rather follow a sequence than choose, theStart Here path orders four of these for a first session. If you want to practise rather than read, go to the Think Lab.
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Showing all 8 items.
Lesson
How to Evaluate an Online Source
Lateral reading in practice: how to judge an unfamiliar website or account in about two minutes by leaving the page rather than studying it.
Lesson
How to Read a News Story Critically
A repeatable six-pass method for reading a news story: claim, sourcing, evidence, framing, omissions, and confidence.
Lesson
How Algorithms Shape What You See
What ranking and recommendation systems optimize for, and how that changes the meaning of popularity, consensus, and urgency in a feed.
Lesson
Understanding Confirmation Bias
What confirmation bias is, the three distinct behaviours it covers, and the small number of countermeasures that survive contact with real evidence.
Lesson
Fact, Inference, and Opinion
How to tell an observation from an interpretation from a value judgment, and why mixing them is the most common reasoning error in public argument.
Lesson
Correlation Is Not Causation
Four specific reasons two things can move together without one causing the other, and the questions that tell them apart in practice.
Lesson
Seven Questions to Ask Before You Share
A thirty-second checklist that catches most of the content people later regret passing along, without requiring you to become a fact checker.
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