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Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine (www.vice.com)

submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.

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[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Of course they could just “trust the experts” instead, but how are they supposed to know which experts to trust if they’re not good at assessing sources of information?

Effort would (IMO) be better spent on showing them how to figure out whether a secondary source is trustworthy than having them try to dissect scientific papers or other primary research materials with an extremely limited understanding of how to do so.

Most laypeople do not have the skills or desire to become good interpreters of scientific, law, technical, or other jargon-laden documents. Some people do not have the mental capacity required to even read raw Clinton staffer email leaks without coming up with shit like Pizzagate.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't help that WikiLeaks added editorial titles to the emails that bore little to no connection to what was actually written. People literally just read the titles, saw that an email was there, and believed it.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

I think it was also indexed, so people started doing things similar to what they're talking about in the article which is basically...they'd use the search engine with some bad search criteria and pretend it proved whatever point it was they were trying to make, even if in context it was completely orthogonal to what they were talking about but just matched via keyword.

I encountered a few of those in the wild at the time...either on Reddit or Twitter (or perhaps both?). They'd send you a query string link and pretend that it was proof someone was a demon or something.