They touch on some valid points, but they don't really address them in any depth. For instance, it's very hard to critically analyze information on many complex topics, without a very deep understanding. A good example is climate change, which is based on computer models that have been adjusted to fit the data. Are they legit? I have no idea, and neither does anybody who lacks a full graduate level education in that narrow specialty.
We can't make fully informed, critical decisions on most topics. We can follow the basic reasoning and recognize some obvious discrepancies, but we lack sufficient context and background information to determine for ourselves whether the reasoning is solid and the discrepancies are real or illusory. We can follow lead and after lead, verifying more and more supporting information, and still have only scratched the surface. So ultimately, we have to trust a source based on a degree of faith rather than on reasoning from first principles.
But their answer, when we tunnel past the coy phrases like "lateral reasoning", is to trust the mainstream narrative. Which they frame as a choice between an encyclopedia that at least has some pretense at objectivity, and an extremist website explicitly promoting highly offensive ideas. But we already assess data based on the reliability of sources. We know that Wikipedia is more trustworthy than Stormfront. That's not a novel insight.
The advice to check an unknown site's credibility before delving too deep is a solid one, and it sounds like it's a major failing of the Stanford students in the study. Though that's less damning than they imply, because even young adults admitted to elite schools are still learning the skills of critical thinking.
But it's only the first step. The article makes a classic mistake, which can be illustrated by a single quote: "[the advice is] designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research. A reporter working on an investigative story or trying to synthesize complex information will have to go deep."
No. A reporter spending a week or two investigating an article (I'm being generous; the typical article probably involves only a few hours of research) is not an expert. They're just someone who has followed a few more leads. The article talks the rabbit hole, but doesn't recognize that's exactly what journalists fall into: Spending a couple extra hours, or a few weeks, researching a subject in which you lack the basic fundamentals doesn't mean you've uncovered an objective truth. Even reporters who spend their entire careers writing on a topic are rarely experts in the subject, because they're trained in writing and asking questions, not in the field itself. But by going a little further, by putting in the time, they've convinced themselves they are experts. That people should listen to them, in their sagacious profundity.
Dammit, people should listen to them. That's what the article is really saying. They've fallen for all the traps they're decrying, and are convinced that they and their peers are objective arbiters of truth, and the problem is people aren't listening them as much as they used to.
But that's garbage, because anyone with a background in a relatively hard scientific field, and the popular reporting on it, knows how bad it can get. It's even worse, in the softer sciences, and I'm guessing it's completely garbage in the humanities.
While it's difficult to fairly analyze information from unfamiliar fields, or fields where we have light or tangential expertise (which can often fool us into thinking we have the knowledge we need to make an informed assessment, when we don't), most of us have areas where we are experts. What happens when we notice that the mainstream sources are sometimes blatantly wrong, in the areas where we are experts? And that they've been have been getting worse and worse, presenting less solid information and getting more and more biased, over time?
The correct assessment isn't to put even more trust in mainstream sources, and to ignore fringe sources. No, the correct assessment is to treat Stormfront as garbage, but to also to downgrade our assessment of the reliability of mainstream sources.
This is a bad result. It doesn't get us to true answer any more reliably. It means it's really hard to know what's true anymore, because the media is untrustworthy. But that's the world we live in, and pretending otherwise is buying into an illusion.