In the last video we talked about how fact checkers out performed some of the smartest

people in the world.

In this video, I want to show you one of the techniques they used to do that.

Let’s go back to the original example, okay.

We were looking at these two sites.

One of them was a long respected professional organization, one of them was considered by many to be basically a

hate site, right?

So how did the fact checkers quickly discern that it was a hate site?

Now, this may sound absurdly simple.

They came to this page, the American College of Pediatricians, but they didn’t read it.

They got off it.

They went to another page they went and did a Google search.

They started asking themselves ‘who are these people publishing this information’?

Once you put in a search like that, a Wikipedia page comes up that talks about it as a socially

conservative advocacy group.

It’s membership It says is estimated at five hundred.

You’ll see that they have an annual budget somewhat of around eighty thousand.

This is not a comparable organization to the American Academy of Pediatricians.

The point here is in order to find out the truth about an organization you’re looking

at, do not look at what the organization says about itself.

Look at what the web is telling you about the organization.

That’s where you’re going to find the truth of the matter.

I’ll show you one trick that you can do that makes this technique super-fast.

Most fact checkers use Wikipedia as a starting point.

It’s usually a great first stop for investigating journalistic sources and organizations.

Take this example, an article from a publication called ‘The Telegraph’.

So, a lot of times I’ll come to a site like this and wonder ‘is this really a news site?’.

So, here’s what I can do, I can go up to the location bar and I can chop off everything

after the initial domain name.

Then I type Wikipedia after it.

Don’t forget the space.

And then I hit return.

Now, if you do that, it will float the Wikipedia page to the top of your search results, and

if you click into that Wikipedia article you can see the Telegraph turns out to be a well-respected

publication.

You can do this with organizations, publications, experts.

Wikipedia won’t always return a high-quality article, but it usually returns a good starting

point.

If you get to a Wikipedia article and you’re not sure you can trust it, just scroll to

the bottom.

Every fact in Wikipedia should be sourced to another publication.

By clicking through to those articles, you can verify the individual facts in the Wikipedia

article.