In 2015, Mike Caulfield popularised the concepts of web content as stream and garden. You can see more in his lecture and post.
His primary work is in collaborative education. His open-source book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers won a MERLOT award.
In that book, he proposes ‘four moves and a habit’ for people seeking the truth. His instructions connect with me, as an exploratory tester – they remind me of what I do, and exhort me to do it better and to explain it more clearly.
He writes:
Moves accomplish intermediate goals in the fact-checking process. They are [strategies] associated with specific tactics. Here are the four moves this guide will hinge on:
Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.
Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information.
Read laterally: Read laterally.[1] Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.
His ‘habit’, since you ask, is to respond to strong emotions with fact-checking.
I’ll add my thoughts in a bit.