I Built a Tool That Coaches You Through Fact-Checking

The Lateral Reading Companion walks you through checking whether something is true, the way professional fact-checkers actually do it.

A while back I launched the Critical Ignoring Companion, a tool for deciding what deserves your attention online. One half of it, the Credibility Check, coached you through fact-checking a claim. It worked well, but initial feedback taught me that particular feature should be simplified, expanded, and made into its own tool.

Fact-checking, and media literacy more broadly, have a major limitation: you are asking people to do more work. So I was trying to figure out how to make this as easy as possible, while still grounded in evidence. To do this, I first realized it’s important to evaluate how much effort a claim even deserves before you start. Some claims have already been debunked by professionals and you just haven’t looked. Some fall apart the second you notice who’s behind them. And a few genuinely need real digging. When you treat all three the same way, checking anything feels exhausting, and exhaustion is exactly what sends people back to avoiding any type of verification.

So I built a tool that matches the effort to the claim.

That tool is now live!

Introducing the Lateral Reading Companion

The Lateral Reading Companion lives at readlaterally.com. You paste in a claim, a headline, or a “new study shows” that made you pause, and instead of telling you whether it’s true, it walks you through checking it yourself. It works in three tiers, and many claims never reach the third. Let me walk through what that actually looks like.

The whole thing runs on lateral reading, the technique professional fact-checkers use. The counterintuitive part: you don’t evaluate a questionable page by studying it. You evaluate it by leaving it, opening a new tab to see what the rest of the web says about the source. You wouldn’t trust a stranger just because they told you they were trustworthy. You’d ask around about them. Lateral reading is asking around about a website. Research consistently shows this beats reading the page top to bottom, and fact-checkers reach sounder conclusions in a fraction of the time. My tool lets you dive into a claim across three tiers of effort.

Tier 0: Has someone already checked this?

The moment you paste a claim, the tool searches a database of published fact-checks from independent fact-checking organizations. If professionals have already evaluated this exact claim or a close cousin, you see their findings in about a second. A huge share of claims can end right here. There’s no reason to reinvent an investigation someone already did!

Say I paste in “ivermectin cures cancer.” If a fact-checker has already taken that apart (which several have as you can see above), the tool surfaces it immediately. Of course, fact-checks are not perfect, so you can still dig deeper if you want, or if you found the fact-checks unsatisfactory.

Tier 1: The one question that catches the most

If nothing’s on file, the tool skips the checklist and asks the single most useful thing first: do you recognize who’s behind this, and would they benefit from you believing it?

That question is a basic source credibility check, and it does a surprising amount of work. If the ivermectin claim traces back to a site that sells ivermectin, I’ve learned much of what I need to know without opening a single study. The tool prompts that recognition before sending me down any deeper path.

Tier 2: The full lateral read

When a claim genuinely warrants it, the tool walks you through the complete investigation. It shares the same three moves every time, so they become a habit: who is behind the source, where the claim originated, and who else is covering it. Each step comes with one-click searches and a bit of coaching tailored to the specific claim you pasted.

For the ivermectin example, that means checking what major health organizations actually say, looking for peer-reviewed research rather than a company’s own page, and seeing whether established science reporters are covering this or only sites echoing the same wording. You do the searching. The tool tells you exactly what to look for and why it matters.

There’s also a follow-up feature: after you do the searching, you can report back what you found to complete the check. The goal, same as with the Critical Ignoring Companion, is to teach skills and build your judgment, not offload your thinking.

A note on how the tool works

I want to be upfront about one design choice, because it’s the most important one: The Lateral Reading Companion never tells you a claim is true or false.

This is deliberate. A tool that only hands you a simple verdict doesn’t help you learn, and it asks you to trust it in exactly the way you shouldn’t trust anything else online. There’s research behind the restraint, too. A recent study in Germany found that lateral-reading and search-based approaches genuinely improved people’s ability to sort reliable from unreliable information, with no backfire effect, but also that any single brief intervention only does so much. The skill isn’t something you install once. It’s something you practice. That’s why the tool coaches instead of concluding, and why it’s built to be used again and again on real claims you actually care about.

It’s also careful about where it sends you. When it suggests a search, it points you toward neutral (as possible), checkable sources. The research record, established news, fact-checking outlets, not toward a page that would just confirm the claim’s own framing. For scientific claims especially, it keeps two questions separate that headlines love to blur together: what does the actual study say, and what is the press saying about it? A lot of health misinformation lives in the gap between those two.

Where this fits with the other tools

The Lateral Reading Companion is the fourth free tool I’ve built, and they work as a set. The Identity Map looks at how the structure of your identities shapes what feels threatening to believe. The Network Diversity Audit looks at how varied your social and information environment actually is. The Critical Ignoring Companion helps you decide what deserves your attention in the first place. And ReadLaterally.com gives you something concrete to do the next time a specific claim stops you in your tracks. These four tools broadly capture the main lessons from my book, Misguided. So it may be awhile until I build any new tools, but I will continue to update these.

What’s next

ReadLaterally.com is online with the first version! I’m actively collecting feedback and will keep improving the coaching, the searches, and the overall experience. The next one on the roadmap is a browser extension that’ll bring the Lateral Reading Companion right onto the page you’re reading, so you don’t have to come to the site to use it.

If you try my Lateral Reading Companion, I’d love to hear what you think. Send me a message here on Substack, on social media, or on my website. Reader feedback has shaped every tool I’ve made, and this one will be no different.

And if you’re an educator, librarian, or workshop facilitator, I’m working on a separate guide for using the Lateral Reading Companion alongside my three other tools in the classroom. I’ll also use these tools in my own classes, and continue to iterate them so they can be as educationally useful as possible.

Try it here!