This handbook was developed as a practical resource for students of journalism, media, and communication studies, as well as early-career journalists, by the Source Criticism and Mediated Disinformation (SCAM) project.

It serves as an online guide for those interested in familiarizing themselves with and practicing digital source criticism, offering a comprehensive approach to evaluating information sources.

How to Use This Online Guide for Digital Source Criticism

We don’t provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we offer a framework that fosters critical media and source literacy—skills that can be applied across various real-life scenarios.

To make the most of this handbook, we recommend a three-step process:

Step 1

Before getting into the details of the handbook, you are advised to familiarise yourself with the basic terms such as digital source criticism, fact-checking, verification, debunking, source, etc. For that, check the glossary page.

We encourage you to get familiar with the 6 principles of digital source criticism, which is the organizing logic for the crucial questions to ask for digital source criticism:
– Tendency
– Interpretation
– Duality
– Relations
– Omission
– Self-assessment

Step 2

Read through the questions following the principles of digital source criticism.

No need to memorize the questions, as far as you understand why to ask them.

Step 3

Read through the cases, discussing the specific examples of asking questions to evaluate the information from various digital channels.