Citizen Literacy was created by Robert Detmering, Amber Willenborg, and Terri Holtze for University of Louisville Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
There's a lot of talk about fake news these days and with the speed that information can be created and broadcast, it can be hard to tell what's real and what's fake. Here are 8 steps you can take to help you decide what information to trust.
Our best advice? Read widely from a variety of reputable sources and ask lots of questions!
Political issues can be difficult to research. Most of the information you will find can be biased in some way. It's important to research your topic in more than one source and closely evaluate the information you find.
Try some of these Library databases:
Web sources that offer reliable information:
Ballotpedia: The Encyclopedia of American Elections
VoteSmart: Factual information on politicians
Open Secrets: Campaign finance information from the Center for Responsive Politics
Fact Checking has become an important part of our information environment. Fact checking sites will help you sort through what is true, what is false, and what is somewhere in between. These unbiased sites are reliable places to separate fact from fiction.