Skip to main content
Citelink

For classrooms

Is this story confirmed, or just repeated?

A free 45-minute media literacy lesson for secondary school and early university classes. Students learn to tell a claim backed by a primary source from one that a dozen outlets simply repeated, using Citelink’s free verification tool.

What you need

  • A browser per pair of students. No student accounts: everyone gets two free checks a day at citelink.news/verify.
  • A teacher account (free) if you want to run more checks yourself and keep a history to show the class.
  • One current story carried by several outlets. Provenance Watch lists this week’s most widely carried stories and how many independent origins each one had.

Lesson plan

  1. 01 · 5 min

    Warm-up: how many sources?

    Show a headline that many outlets ran. Ask: if twelve news sites report something, how many people actually checked it? Collect guesses.

  2. 02 · 10 min

    Primary, independent, repeated

    Introduce three ideas. A primary source is the original document or data. Independent sources found the facts themselves. Repeated sources rewrote someone else’s report — often a wire service or a press release.

  3. 03 · 15 min

    Check a claim in pairs

    Each pair picks a claim from a current story and runs it on citelink.news/verify. They record the label Citelink gives, how many sources support or contradict it, and whether any source is a primary document.

  4. 04 · 10 min

    Trace one source by hand

    Pairs open one cited source and look for where its facts came from: a named document, a quote, a wire credit such as “(AP)”, or nothing at all. Does it match what Citelink found?

  5. 05 · 5 min

    Exit ticket

    One sentence each: “I would trust this claim more / less because…”, naming the kind of evidence, not the outlet.

Reading Citelink’s labels

  • Traced to primary source — a government body, agency or journal states the claim directly.
  • Independently corroborated — unrelated newsrooms report it, after outlets carrying the same copy are counted once.
  • Single-sourced — however many outlets ran it, it traces to one origin. Not necessarily false; just unconfirmed.
  • Refuted or No supporting source — trusted sources contradict it, or none states it.

Citelink deliberately gives no percentage score: a number like “87% true” sounds precise but cannot be checked. Ask students why that might matter.

A note for teachers

Citelink is automated and can be wrong — which is itself a good discussion point. Please have students check public claims only, never claims about classmates or other private people. If a result looks wrong, tell us. Using this lesson? We would love to hear how it went: hello@citelink.news.