I believe information literacy is one of the most transformative skills a person can develop right now.
That belief doesn’t come from professional interest, academic training, or the broad principle that critical thinking is a good idea. I believe it because information literacy changes how a person moves through a world that feels increasingly overwhelming and increasingly difficult to trust.
A scary headline asks us to do more than absorb information. It asks us to decide what that information means for our lives before we fully understand what we’re looking at. Without knowing whether the source deserves our trust, whether the context is complete, or whether the level of alarm matches the facts, we’re already trying to orient ourselves to what the story might require from us.
That orientation process is where the real questions begin: How seriously should I take this? How much fear is appropriate? Does this require preparation, caution, research, or perspective? Who should I trust? What is actually happening? How does this affect me and the people I love?
These are the questions underneath almost every frightening headline. They’re the practical, human stakes of trying to live inside a news cycle that constantly asks us to react before we understand.
Without a way to evaluate the information in front of us, fear starts filling in the gaps. It decides how serious something feels before we’ve had a chance to understand how serious something is.
Information literacy closes that gap.
It isn’t an abstract skill reserved for classrooms or research projects. It’s the protocol, tool, and technique that helps us determine what’s true and trustworthy in a world where frightening information reaches us constantly.
The recent hantavirus headlines are a clear example of this experience. My goal here is not to write a reported piece about the true facts of the case; that work belongs to journalists, scientists, and public health experts. What interests me is the experience of being a person on the receiving end of those headlines, trying to decipher which claims hold up and how much of the alarm the situation actually warrants.
When a frightening story starts circulating, the emotional response often arrives faster than the context. One headline emphasizes danger. Another source complicates the first claim. A percentage gets repeated without enough explanation. A detail starts to feel more meaningful than it may actually be. Before long, what feels most overwhelming isn't the event itself but the experience of encountering alarming information from all digital directions and not knowing how to assess altogether what it means for our lives.
Information literacy is what makes that assessment possible. It's what we're doing when we search for where a claim originated before accepting it as fact, when we go to the original report instead of relying on someone's summary or interpretation, when we notice that two credible sources seem to disagree and can check whether they're describing different things, and when we spot that an alarming number is missing the context that would change what it means.
Now those skills are practical, but their purpose is also emotional.
Underneath the frameworks, techniques, source evaluation methods, and research skills, I think one of the deepest purposes of information literacy is peace.
I mean the peace of being able to look at something frightening and know how to make sense of what we’re seeing. The peace of knowing where to look, what to question, which sources deserve trust, and how to tell whether a claim is being presented with enough context. The peace of being able to say: I know how to figure out what’s happening here.
That kind of confidence doesn’t come from being reassured by someone else. Reassurance can calm us down for a moment, but it doesn’t give us the underlying skill. A steadier confidence comes from doing the work of evaluation ourselves until the process becomes familiar enough to rely on.
That practice changes our relationship to fear.
A scary headline can still be scary. The world can still be frightening. But information literacy gives us something to do before fear starts making decisions for us. It gives us a way to slow down, look for context, find the source, and decide how meaningful the information really is.
The hantavirus headlines will eventually leave the front of people’s minds because every news cycle eventually moves on. Another frightening story will take their place. The subject will change, but the underlying question will remain the same: do we have the tools to figure out what this means for our lives?
When we do, fear becomes something we can work with. When we don’t, fear becomes the thing deciding what we believe, who we trust, and how safe we feel in the world.
So this is what information literacy is for. It helps us move through an increasingly scary world with more confidence and more peace, so we’re not left at the mercy of every headline designed to make us afraid.
The hantavirus coverage circulating right now is a clear example of this dynamic playing out in real time. The version of the story moving across social media and the version contained in the primary sources describe what looks like two entirely different situations. That discrepancy becomes visible the moment we look at the way alarming content is structured and distributed.
How the information arrives
The way we encounter alarming information has changed fundamentally over the past decade. Stories about emerging health threats and public safety concerns no longer arrive through a single, clearly attributed news report that we can evaluate on its own terms. They arrive in fragments across platforms, in formats that are structurally optimized to produce an emotional response before any evaluation can begin.
The hantavirus story followed this pattern closely. It showed up as a carousel with a biohazard symbol and block-letter text reading “THE NEXT PANDEMIC?”, as a screenshot of a tweet from someone with a verification badge saying “this is how it started last time,” as a percentage circulating without any visible source, and as a mortality rate presented without surrounding context. Each fragment arrived stripped of the information that would help someone figure out what they were looking at and how concerned they should be.
This pattern extends far beyond any single news cycle. Alarming content on social media, whether it takes the form of a carousel, a screenshot, a tweet, a short video, or a reshared infographic, tends to compress complex situations into a series of escalating claims where each slide or frame ratchets up the emotional stakes. This structure performs extraordinarily well because alarming content gets shared, screenshotted, and forwarded to group chats at a rate that calm, contextual content simply can’t match. The creator gets visibility and the platform gets engagement metrics, while the person encountering the content absorbs a spike of alarm and has no useful framework for processing what they just read.
The underlying events behind the content may be real, and the emotions the content produces are certainly real. But the way the information has been packaged strips away the context that would help someone distinguish between “a serious situation being managed by health authorities” and “a threat that requires personal panic,” because that distinction doesn’t generate shares. The gap between what the content contains and what the content leaves out is where the most consequential misunderstandings take root.
Once we can recognize that pattern, the question becomes what to do with alarming content once it’s in front of us. A reliable set of evaluation skills can be applied to any piece of alarming content regardless of the format it arrives in or the platform it arrives on. Each example below uses this week’s hantavirus coverage as a live demonstration, but the underlying skill transfers to any situation where alarming information is circulating.
The evaluation protocol
We live inside an information environment that produces more terrifying material than we can process, in formats designed to bypass critical thinking rather than support careful evaluation. Developing a reliable set of evaluation skills is how we build the capacity to engage with distressing information without being overwhelmed by the emotional response those formats are engineered to produce. These skills apply to anything we encounter that’s designed to provoke alarm, whether it arrives as a headline, a carousel, a screenshot, a reshared infographic, or a claim circulating in a comment section.
Trace the claim to its source
Alarming numbers circulate on social media constantly, and they almost always arrive without any visible source attribution. When a number appears inside a carousel or gets repeated across posts and comment sections, it tends to take on the feel of established fact simply through repetition. Tracing that number back to where it originated is one of the most clarifying things we can do, because the source almost always changes how much weight the number deserves.
In last week’s hantavirus coverage, a specific claim kept appearing: a double-digit probability that the outbreak would become a pandemic. The number was circulating as though it reflected scientific consensus or institutional analysis. When traced back to its source, it turned out to come from Polymarket, which is a prediction market, a platform where users place monetary bets on whether future events will occur. The percentage wasn’t a scientific projection at all. It was the collective wagering of bettors who were, in many cases, reacting to the same alarming social media content as everyone else. The figure had swung wildly since the market opened, peaking above 38% and dropping as low as 3.5% depending on the news cycle, and no epidemiologist or public health institution had produced or published any version of it.
When an alarming number is circulating without visible attribution, searching for the specific claim plus the word “source” or “origin” will surface where it came from. The origin story of a number almost always changes how seriously it should be taken, and building the reflex to search before accepting a number at face value is one of the most reliable ways to short-circuit the fear response that unsourced statistics are designed to produce.
Read the primary document
Most distressing coverage, regardless of the topic, traces back to a primary source: an official report, a government notice, a research paper, or a court filing. That primary source is almost always publicly available, and reading it directly rather than reading coverage about it is one of the highest-leverage habits a person can build for navigating alarming information. News articles compress and reframe source material under deadline pressure, and the compression often shifts the emphasis in ways that amplify the sense of alarm beyond what the primary source supports.
In the case of hantavirus, nearly all of last week’s coverage traces back to a single document: a disease outbreak notice issued by the World Health Organization. The WHO (the United Nations agency responsible for international public health) publishes these notices that are freely accessible to anyone. This particular notice contains a line that a striking amount of the coverage either buried deep in the article or omitted altogether: “WHO currently assesses the risk to the global population from this event as low.” The WHO’s own risk assessment paints a substantially different picture than the one most of the headlines conveyed, and finding that out required nothing more than reading the document the headlines were based on.
Check the scope when credible sources seem to contradict each other
One of the most disorienting experiences in any alarming news cycle is encountering two credible sources that appear to say opposite things. When both sources are authoritative and both are being cited by major outlets, the instinct is to either grab the scarier version or tune out entirely. But apparent contradictions between credible sources almost always mean the sources are describing different things at different scales, and checking the scope of each claim will resolve the conflict far more often than we’d expect.
Last week’s hantavirus coverage offered a clear example. The WHO describes transmission as requiring “close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members or intimate partners.” A peer-reviewed study published in the New England Journal of Medicine documents cases of transmission at a crowded social gathering in Argentina where an infected person was present for 90 minutes. The apparent contradiction between these two claims was fueling significant anxiety in comment sections and group chats all week, but the contradiction dissolves once we recognize that the two sources are operating at different scales. The WHO statement describes the general pattern observed across all documented outbreaks of Andes hantavirus over several decades, while the NEJM study describes transmission events within one specific outbreak where infected individuals had unusually high concentrations of virus in their systems. One is a finding about what tends to happen across the full body of evidence, and the other is a finding about what happened in one specific situation under unusual circumstances.
Look for the number that’s been left out
Alarming statistics often circulate in a form that has been stripped of the surrounding numbers that would put them in context. A percentage without the population it applies to, or a rate without the base it’s drawn from, can produce fear that feels proportionate to reality but isn’t, because the pieces that would complete the picture have been removed. Developing the habit of asking “what data is missing from this number?” is one of the most effective ways to bring a concerning claim into proportion.
Last week’s hantavirus coverage provided a vivid example. “A virus with a 40% mortality rate” is one of the most alarming sentences a person can encounter in a news cycle, and taken on its own, it communicates existential danger. But that 40% applies specifically to people who develop the full hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which is itself a small fraction of the people who are exposed. Among household contacts of an infected person who aren’t sharing a bed with that person, the documented infection rate in previous Andes virus outbreaks is approximately 1%. Since tracking began in 1993, approximately 900 total cases of all hantavirus strains combined have been documented across the entire United States. The sentence “a virus with a 40% mortality rate” and the sentence “a virus that has produced approximately 900 cases in this country since 1993, with a roughly 1% infection rate among household contacts” describe the same virus. The difference is that the first version has had its surrounding context removed, and the alarm it generates is a direct consequence of that removal.
What all of this is for
Each of these skills changes the experience of encountering upsetting content, and together they change something larger: the relationship between the person and the uncertainty. Tracing a source, reading a primary document, checking scope, and restoring missing context are individual actions, but the cumulative effect is a shift in how we orient ourselves to unsettling information. Instead of absorbing the emotional charge of a headline and reacting from that charge, we develop the capacity to evaluate what we’re looking at before deciding how to respond.
Evaluation doesn’t always produce a reassuring answer, and it was never designed to. A primary document can confirm that a situation is serious, and sources can align in ways that make the alarm entirely warranted. The value of evaluation lies in arriving at a grounded understanding rather than remaining at the mercy of whatever emotional response the content was engineered to produce. A grounded understanding means knowing whether concern is supported by the actual evidence, or inflated by the way information was stripped down and repackaged before it reached our screens.
That distinction reshapes the decisions we make about our health, our families, our plans, and our sense of safety. It becomes available to us through practice: through tracing sources, reading primary documents, checking scope, and restoring the missing context that gets left out. Each time we reach for these skills instead of reaching for the scroll, the gap between overwhelm and understanding closes a little more.
The next destabilizing story is already forming somewhere, and the information environment that delivers it will optimize for emotional impact long before it reaches our screens. What changes with practice is our capacity to meet that content with a rational assessment of what we’re looking at, and the ability to act from understanding rather than from the reaction the content was designed to provoke. That capacity compounds with every use, and building it is some of the most consequential work we can do for ourselves and the people we love.
You might also like:
We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much: On the cost of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once.
Information Triage: A Librarian’s Guide to the Current Threat Environment: Reliable information doesn’t disappear in a crisis. It gets buried under everything that isn’t.
27 Ways to Access Scientific Research: A complete guide to finding, reading, and evaluating scientific papers — and knowing what questions matter before you trust the findings.
The free essays are the foundation. The paid tier is the applied toolkit: biweekly AI briefings, monthly subscriber-driven research, quarterly guides that give you real skills you can use immediately, plus the Classroom coming in June. Upgrade to paid if you want the full Card Catalog. Thank you for being here!
Here is the California map of Hantavirus cases
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/CDPH%20Document%20Library/CountyofExposureforReportedHantavirus.pdf
Agreed 👍💯💯
Ground.News, archives.org, DemocracyNow.org, Democracy Docket... lots of truth being waited to be rediscovered. Even IMDb.com is a great research tool