A new study shows that searching online to evaluate news can actually increase beliefs in misinformation, especially when search engines return low-quality information. This highlights the need for better media literacy programs and improved search engine responsiveness. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Alarming research findings demonstrate the limitations of using recommended procedures to debunk false content.
Conventional wisdom holds that searching online to assess the veracity of misinformation can lead to less belief in that information. But a new study by a team of researchers shows that the opposite is happening. This means that searches are actually taking place to assess the veracity of false news articles. To increase Probability of believing false information.
The results of this study will be published in the journal today (December 20th) Nature, provides insight into the impact of search engine output on users. This is a relatively under-researched area.
How search engines influence users’ beliefs
“Our research shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases beliefs in misinformation, which is very common and by a significant amount.” new york universityCenter for Social Media Politics (CSMaP) and one of the authors of this paper.
The reason for this result may be explained by the search engine output. Researchers found that this phenomenon was concentrated among individuals for whom search engines returned low-quality information.
“This means that ‘data gaps’ (areas of the information ecosystem dominated by low-quality or outright false news and information) play a significant role in the online search process, leading to poor search results. “The danger is that you may see reliable or, even more alarmingly, unreliable information at the top of search results,” said lead author and University of Central Florida professor said Kevin Alette, assistant professor and CSMaP faculty researcher.
Methodology and focus of nature research
The newly published Nature Aslett, Sanderson, and their colleagues studied the effects of using online search engines to evaluate false or misleading views. This approach is recommended by technology companies, government agencies, and others.
To do so, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (a tool frequently used to conduct behavioral science research) and conducted a series of five experiments. Its purpose is to measure the impact of common actions. i.e. Searching and Evaluating News Online (SOTEN).
Investigating online search behavior and its impact
The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:
- The impact of SOTEN on believing both false or misleading news and true news within two days of article publication (popular fake articles included articles such as: COVID-19 (new coronavirus infection) vaccines, Trump impeachment proceedings, climate change, etc.)
- Does the effect of SOTEN change individuals’ evaluations of the truthfulness of news articles?
- blue sky effect Month After publication
- The impact of SOTEN on recent news about salient topics with important news coverage – in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic.
The fifth study combined survey and web tracking data to determine the effects of exposure to both low- and high-quality search engine results on misinformation beliefs. By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, researchers were able to determine how search results were displayed. quality These search results can influence users’ beliefs about the misinformation being evaluated.
Source credibility ratings for this study were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites to help users evaluate the trustworthiness of content they encounter online.
Conclusion and recommendations
Across five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation. This occurred either immediately or months after the incorrect information was published. This finding suggests that the passage of time, and the ostensible opportunity for fact-checking to enter the information ecosystem, does not reduce the impact of SOTEN, which increases the likelihood of believing a false news article to be true. Additionally, a fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return low-quality information.
“The findings of this study underscore the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and the need for search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified in this study.” ” concludes Joshua A. Tucker, professor of political science and co-director of CSMaP. of the author of the paper.
Reference: “Online searches to evaluate misinformation may increase perceptions of its truth,” December 20, 2023 Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y
Other authors on the paper include William Gaedel and Jonathan Nagler of New York University’s Center for Social Media Politics and Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School.
This research was supported by a grant (2029610) from the National Science Foundation.
Source: scitechdaily.com
