Information Literacy As a Factor of Success at Lateral Reading

The spreading of misleading information can be harmful at the individual level, for instance when looking for health and adolescent related information, and at the social and political level, increasing digital divide and political segregation. Previous research shows that high levels of information literacy have a positive effect on reducing the negative impact of the Internet, while the spread of fake news in communities with high levels of information literacy is slowing down. However, the majority of users still have trouble recognizing inaccurate and biased sources. Researchers offer solutions that include automatic labeling and moderation methods, crowdsourcing, educational programs development, and increasing general digital literacy level in a society. One such method is lateral reading, proposed by Wineburg & McGrew (2017), based on the experience of professional fact-checkers and showing better results than previously recommended approaches. The new approach relies on external rather than internal characteristics to assess the credibility of the source, i.e. reading laterally - simultaneously opening up many new tabs in search of opinions about the information source. The purpose of this study was to replicate the results obtained in Wineburg & McGrew (2017), as well as to answer additional questions by identifying which aspects of information literacy are most important to the ability to correctly assess whether a source of information can be trusted. An online survey (N = 140) was conducted to answer the research questions, in which respondents were asked to take an information literacy test, as well as to perform a text validity assessment assignment, indicating what they were using during the assignment. The results show that the level of information literacy is positively correlated with the frequency of lateral reading and the number of different approaches used during the assignment. However, the analysis did not reveal a significant relationship between information literacy level and the ability to correctly determine the validity of a fragment, and the overall level of skills was low as the majority of respondents were unable to correctly answer with an overestimation of unreliable text.