Thinking critically through controversial issues on digital media: Dispositions and key criteria for content evaluation

•Controversial issues on the web require special evaluation.•Authorship, including expertise and motivation, is widely accepted as an evaluation criterion yet not enough for evaluating controversial issues.•Checking the method of information production is essential when it comes to evaluating controversial issues.•Pre- and post-publication corroboration is necessary to determine content reliability on the web.•Dispositions around cognitive effort and fairmindedness play a central role in controversial content evaluation. 21st-century society is facing a crisis of truth. Digital media lends itself to this by allowing the dissemination of almost unlimited quantities of unverified content. This threatens the development of accurate thinking along with the decision-making process in critical situations. Learning how to evaluate online information is thus vital in such scenarios. Much has been done in this regard, including explanations of criteria for evaluating information. However, some criteria may require explicitness. Critical thinking (CT) dispositions also need to be addressed more emphatically in the online content evaluation process. This study attempted to address both aspects theoretically in the context of controversial issues on the Web. Evaluating controversial content requires rigorous standards beyond the widely agreed criteria involving authorship, meaning criteria related to content production (systematicity) and its validation or corroboration (scrutiny). Consequently, four evaluation criteria were proposed, namely, author position, author motivation, systematicity, and independent scrutiny, which require the identification and practice of specific evaluation skills, basic knowledge, and fundamentally, key CT dispositions. Both the skills and dispositions are discussed around a general framework introduced in this study with educational implications for the evaluation of controversial content online and beyond.