"Do your own research" has become a popular slogan among many conspiracy theorists in recent years. Whether flat earth theorists or anti-vaxxers, the slogan is often used in an attempt to awaken skeptics and opponents. However, the concept of "research", i.e. investigating something for more information, seems to be supposed to limit the spread of disinformation. So what's going on?
According to a new study, the problem may stem from the method used to conduct such research - the Internet search engines that are commonly used. This issue has been known for some time. In some cases, there may not be enough information about a particular area or focus of a conspiracy theory, so conducting internet-based research on this topic may cause users to fall into a "data gap" that reinforces the associated conspiracy beliefs.
For example, suppose there is an article describing the so-called "economic famine" that claims it was caused by the planned COVID-19 lockdown and vaccination in the United States. And the term "economic famine" is likely not to appear in reliable sources, so relying on the word is likely to increase the odds of encountering misleading results.
"The question here is what happens when people come across an article online, have doubts about its authenticity, and then use search engines to look for more information," Joshua Tucker, co-director and co-author of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics, said in an interview with Vice's Motherboard. "You'll see this kind of advice in a lot of digital literacy guides. ”
In their experiment, Tucker and his colleagues wanted to explore how people can verify the veracity of news. The first experiment began in late 2019. About 3,000 participants from across the U.S. evaluated the accuracy of news articles on topics such as Trump's impeachment process, COVID-19 vaccines, and climate change.
Each article was published within the last 48 hours. Some of the articles are from reliable sources, others are deliberately misleading. Half of the respondents were asked to search online to verify the authenticity of the articles, which were labeled "true," "false or misleading," or "uncertain," by professional fact-checkers.
The results showed that those who were asked to verify articles through an online search were more likely than those who were not encouraged to rate false or misleading stories as fact.
In four follow-up experiments conducted between 2019 and 2021, it was found that about 18% of people who showed initial distrust of a story, rating it as "misleading" and then changed it to "fact" after conducting an online search, while only 6% changed from fact to falsehood.
"In five studies, we found that the act [of searching online to assess news] significantly increased trust in extremely popular misinformation," the team explained in the paper. "Using digital tracking data, we provide evidence consistent with the existence of data gaps, as we found that individuals were more likely to be exposed to lower-quality information when they searched online for misleading information about it, rather than when they searched for real news," they added. ”
It seems that exposure is more important than previously thought. Those exposed to "low-quality information" are more likely to believe false or misleading reports than those who are not.
"'Do your own research' are the four most dangerous words," Chirag Shah, a professor of information science at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research, told Motherboard. The problem is that people don't know how to do it. ”
The study was published in the journal Nature.