To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking—but you also need critical ignoring

Understanding problems and identifying solutions requires identifying credible sources to inform that understanding. Yet an explosion in information over the past two decades has left students ill-prepared to critically assess the legitimacy of that information. In this article, Stanford professor Sam Wineburg describes his research on how students typically evaluate the sources of online information. He suggests “lateral reading” strategies used by fact checkers as one way to more critically assess what we read online.