Resource · Media & Political Literacy

A student's guide to evaluating political claims

Practical questions to ask before you share — about a 5-minute read

Political claims are everywhere. They come at you in news headlines, social media posts, group chats, YouTube videos and short clips that play before you've even decided whether to watch them. Some are accurate. Some are misleading. Some are just wrong. Most fall somewhere in between.

You don't need to be a journalist or a fact-checker to handle this well. You just need a small set of habits — questions to ask before you trust a claim or pass it on. This is that set of habits.

The five questions

1. Where is this actually coming from?

Before anything else: who is making this claim? Is it a news organisation? A political party? An individual on social media? An anonymous account? "Some people say" and "sources suggest" are not sources — they're hedges. If you can't identify a real person or organisation behind a claim, that's your first warning sign.

Quick check: click the account or the byline. Have they made other claims that turned out to be true? Do they exist outside this one post?

2. What is the original source?

Most political claims you see have already passed through several hands by the time they reach you. A study gets summarised in a press release. The press release gets reported by a news site. The news article gets posted on social media with a headline. The post gets screenshotted and shared again. By the end, the original meaning has often shifted.

Quick check: try to trace the claim back one or two steps. If a post says "new research shows X," can you find the research? If a headline says "Minister claims Y," can you find what the minister actually said?

3. Is the claim specific or vague?

Specific claims can be checked. Vague claims usually can't, which is why people who don't want to be checked often prefer them. "Crime is rising" is vague. "Knife crime in this city rose 12% last year, according to police data" is specific. The second one might be wrong, but at least you can find out. The first one is designed to sit in your head without being tested.

Quick check: ask yourself "what would I need to see to prove this wrong?" If the answer is nothing, the claim is doing emotional work, not factual work.

4. Is it telling you what to think, or showing you something?

There's a difference between a post that says "Here's what happened, here's the evidence, you decide" and one that says "You should be furious about this." Both can be valid — opinion is a legitimate part of political life — but they're different things. Confusing them is one of the easiest ways to be manipulated.

Quick check: how does the claim make you feel before it makes you think? If your reaction is strongly emotional within the first second, slow down. Strong feelings make it easier to skip the checking.

5. What is being left out?

This is the hardest one and the most important. A claim can be technically true and still misleading because of what it doesn't tell you. A chart can start at the wrong point on the y-axis. A statistic can compare a bad year to a great year and call it a crisis. A video clip can leave out the question that produced the answer.

Quick check: if this were exaggerated or one-sided, what would the missing piece be? Ask the question even when you agree with the claim. Especially when you agree with the claim.

A short checklist

Before you share anything political online, run through this list:

• Do I know who is making this claim?
• Can I find the original source?
• Is the claim specific enough to be checked?
• Is this showing me something, or telling me how to feel?
• What might be missing from this picture?

If a claim fails two or more of these, pause. That doesn't mean it's false — it means you don't yet know whether it's true.

One more thing

This isn't about being cynical. The goal isn't to disbelieve everything; it's to know what you're believing and why. Most of what you read online is fine. Some of it is excellent. A small amount is deliberately designed to mislead you, and a slightly larger amount is just careless. The five questions above are how you stay on the right side of that line — not by being suspicious of everyone, but by being clear-eyed about what you actually have evidence for.

The best test of whether you understand a political claim is whether you can argue both sides of it fairly. If you can, you're thinking. If you can only argue your side, you're repeating.

This resource is free for any teacher to use in class or share with students. If you adapt it for your school, we'd love to hear how it went — hello@morepoliticaleducation.org.uk.