Not all internet information is accurate or trustworthy. Check who wrote it, if they're an expert, if other sources confirm it, and whether there's obvious bias. Evaluating sources prevents believing false information.
Find the same information from different sources (news site, social media, blog) and compare. Look for author credentials and publication date. Check for obvious bias or financial motive.
When you search for something online, you are not searching through information that has been verified or ranked by accuracy — you are searching through an enormous collection of content produced by anyone, for any purpose. Search engines rank results by predicted relevance and engagement, not by truth. This means the first result for a health question could be a legitimate medical institution, a well-designed misinformation site, a sponsored advertisement, or a blog post written by someone with no expertise. The skill of evaluating credibility is how you navigate this environment without being misled.
The most reliable single question to ask about any source is: who wrote this, and what do they know? An article about vaccine safety written by an immunologist at a university research hospital carries more authority than one written by an anonymous blogger. An article about a legal dispute written by a lawyer is more reliable than one written by someone with a clear stake in the outcome. Look for authorship: is a name attached? Can you find out who that person is? Are they affiliated with an institution that has accountability — a university, a hospital, a recognized news organization? Anonymous content is not automatically false, but the absence of attribution removes one of your key ways to assess reliability.
The next step is corroboration: does more than one independent, credible source make the same claim? A claim that appears on many websites is not automatically verified — misinformation spreads rapidly and can appear on hundreds of sites within hours of originating from a single false source. What matters is whether credible, independent sources with different institutional perspectives agree. If a medical claim is backed by a peer-reviewed study, reported by multiple health journalists, and confirmed by a major health organization, that convergence is meaningful. If it appears only on advocacy sites, social media, and blogs, the convergence reflects spread, not verification.
Lateral reading is a technique fact-checkers use: rather than reading a website deeply to evaluate it, search for what others say *about* that website or source. Type the name of the publication or author into a search engine alongside terms like "reliability," "bias," or "misinformation" and see what comes up. This is more efficient than trying to assess credibility from inside the source itself — you can quickly learn whether an outlet has a track record of inaccuracy, a known ideological slant, or a financial incentive to mislead. Combined with checking publication dates (outdated information can be wrong for good reasons), these practices form a repeatable system for evaluating claims that you can apply every time you encounter unfamiliar information online.