The context removed
The image is authentic, the quote exact, the video real. What has gone missing is the date, the place, the sentence before. Nothing was faked: cutting was enough.
Information programme
Check before you believe, and before you share
learning to check what you read
This programme holds what the association publishes about information: how it is made, how it travels, and the moment we decide to believe it. It asks nobody to become a journalist. It installs a handful of moves that take seconds and happen before the share rather than after: who is speaking, where this sentence comes from, when it dates from, what is missing. Those moves are learned on concrete cases, because an abstract rule is forgotten and a case you have worked through stays.
Why this field matters
A false sentence travels just as well as a true one
Nothing about the way information reaches us signals that it has been checked. A headline is written to be opened, not to be accurate. A photograph proves that a scene existed, never that it happened where we are told it did. A figure cut off from the whole it came from tells us close to nothing. Nobody sorted any of it before us: the sorting falls to us, and it happens in seconds.
That is exactly where educational work earns its place, and not only the case-by-case correction. Correcting one false story settles one case; recognizing the device that holds it up settles a whole family of them. The next fabrication will use the same spring with different faces: urgency, outrage, borrowed authority, the one accurate detail that covers a false whole.
None of these moves calls for technical skill. They call for practice, because they run against a slope: we believe more readily what confirms what we already thought, and we share more readily what makes us angry. Knowing that is not enough. Practising is.
The devices
Three springs that always come back
Borrowed authority
A title, a white coat, a logo, a line saying researchers have shown, with no name and no journal. The shape of the evidence is there; the evidence is not. The exact name, meanwhile, is one search away.
The figure with no whole
A raw number always impresses. Set against the total it came from, or against the same measure elsewhere, it sometimes turns ordinary, and sometimes turns out to mean the opposite of what was drawn from it.
The resource, in counted figures
The resource, in counted figures
750training cases published
10verification habits
7complete languages
10case categories, across 3 levels
Figures recounted at every release from the resource’s public data: see the method
On the action map
What this programme has put online
What this programme publishes is not something to describe: it opens. The action map carries each action’s sheet, its format, its languages, the area it genuinely applies to and its address.
- Avant d’y croireCheck a piece of information before believing or sharing it, on training cases that are realistic and entirely fictional.
The habits, as they appear on the site
The habits, as they appear on the site
“Who is speaking? What’s the source? What’s the date? Too good to be true? What if I’m the one who’s wrong?”
Five of the habits from Before You Believe It (Avant d’y croire)
These are questions, not verdicts. They never say that a piece of information is false: they say whether there is enough there to believe it. The last one is the hardest and the most useful, because it applies just as much, and above all, to whatever happens to suit us.
Who it is for
One resource, three ways to use it
- General public
- On your own, with no account and no sign-up: you read a case, you take a stand, and the correction walks back through the clues one by one. Twenty minutes are enough to leave with two or three solid habits.
- Families and carers
- Enough to hold a conversation rather than give a lecture: a case opens for two, gets discussed, and gets settled together. That works better than being right on someone else’s behalf.
- Teachers and activity leaders
- Projected with a show of hands, worked through independently, or printed as a booklet: no account to create, no student data to hand over, and the open license allows adapting to the level of the group.
The shape
What this programme publishes, and how
The field changes from one programme to the next; the shape does not. Everything the association puts online follows the same construction rules, and they can be checked against what is already published.
The invariants
- Free, no account, no ads: the resource opens and works, that’s it.
- No data collected: no cookie, no tracker, no request to a third-party server.
- Content under a CC BY 4.0 license: reuse, adapt, translate, republish, with one attribution line.
- Open data as JSON, downloadable, so anyone can recount every figure stated.
- Readable without JavaScript and printable, for working on paper or offline.
These five lines are not an intention: they can be verified page by page on this programme’s resource, with the network inspector open.
Keep going
The action map is the only way in to what the association has put online: it gives the sheets, the formats, the languages, the real reach and the addresses. The catalogue, for its part, shows the 7 programmes side by side.