Notes and reflections on history and education
What’s wrong with this scenario?
Your mailman delivers junk mail to your home—misleading ads, bad science, dubious politics—and you find his home address, push the junk mail into his face, and ask him to “prove it.” He can’t prove any of it, and you celebrate your sophisticated information literacy.
If your only move after hearing a claim is to look into the source of that claim, you might be guilty of a version of this absurd scenario: you’re fact-checking the mailman, not the person making the claims the mailman is merely delivering. You’re fact-checking the information distributor, not the information manufacturer.
Tracing claims back to their original source instead of the anonymous mouthpiece that shared them with us is not new—even if we don’t do it ourselves, if asked we’d all agree that it’s an obvious best-practice in 2026.
But it’s not what’s happening. Research suggests young adults get and believe a lot of new information from information middlemen on social media, and they take in this new information passively, without putting up any kind of active filter for what’s true, what’s false, and what’s fluff. They’re primed in a thousand ways to believe what they’re exposed to, rather than what’s been verified.
Setting aside the pitfalls of passive information consumption for now, how do we efficiently verify the claims we hear in an age where a lot of those claims seem totally anonymous?
My suggestion: put the claim into AI, then push the AI with follow-up questions about evidence and context. Utilize the best sources that come from that conversation.
Go ahead and run a test: Is it easier to look into who I am and what my sources are in order to judge the credibility of what I’m saying, or to plug my claims into an AI chatbot, get a quick sense of the broader context of my claims, and derive a handful of reliable sources from that conversation?
Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #10: “Fact-checking the mailman”
verifying a claim by merely looking into the person who delivered it to you, even if they’re only a third-party delivery person, rather than the original source
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3 Responses
Getting sources from AI would prbably be faster, but you would have more risk of error, as well as you probably wouldn’t have as good of an understanding as if you looked it up manually and extensively.
I gave it a go. Actually I have used AI to get a broader view of an issue before. I like it because it helps me see multiple sides of the story, it doesn’t care what my political position is, and I can see where it is pulling its information. The headlines I pulled made for interesting chats and included AI backtracking when I pushed for sources saying that part of the conversation was an “interpretation of the reported incidents”. Which I do not call good or bad, but important to recognize. Also important to remember is AI can only search what is online. It’s not somehow pulling truth out of a blackhole. So I think AI is an excellent shortcut to seeing multiple sources and seeing where information is coming from quickly. Or it could just be moving the mailman.
I have avoided AI. I refused to use it or look at any results, even though AI results are the top result returned. I was uncomfortable with a computer forming an opinion or suggestion instead of just providing facts. I was shocked when this article advocated using AI.
In the past I have asked people where they got their information for their opinion from. Often, they were unable to tell me.
Since reading this blog post I have tried asking AI as suggested. I still have mixed feelings about using AI at all. Since it appears it is here to stay, I have decided I should use it some more to have a fully developed opinion on the good or bad of AI.