For this assignment, you should seek the truth by assessing the credibility of three web sources dealing with the same topic.

Assignment Purpose: Students must attempt to determine whether or not a particular claim found on the internet is true by assessing the credibility of three internet sources covering that claim.

A claim is an assertion that needs to be supported by strong, credible evidence in order to be considered believable. Needless to say, there are many claims with dubious truth value circulating around the internet. Oftentimes, such claims will be passed along as truth via social media, taking on a life of their own. They may be satirical in nature (e.g., The Onion or the Borowitz Report), they may be conspiracy-minded (e.g., Infowars), or they may be flat-out “fake news” that’s simply been made up. Oftentimes, the credibility of a source can tell us how much we should trust the information provided by that source. While a source’s credibility does not guarantee that the information and claims it presents are trustworthy (just as a source’s lack of credibility does not guarantee that the information and claims it presents is untrustworthy), as a general rule, more credible sources present better and more trustworthy information, while less credible sources present much more questionable (and sometimes flat-out false) information.

For this assignment, you should seek the truth by assessing the credibility of three web sources dealing with the same topic. The assumption here is that highly credible web sources are trustworthy, while web sources with little credibility should be considered highly suspect; therefore, determining the credibility of a web source will help you evaluate the truth value of a claim made by that source. If a website is considered highly credible, it is highly likely that we can trust the information it presents; if a website is found to be not very credible, then we should be highly skeptical of any claims or information presented on that site.