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A study published in Nature last week has uncovered that using online search engines to vet conspiracies can actually compound the probability that someone will believe it.
In November, UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay sounded the alarm on the intensification of misinformation and hate speech online, which she said poses ‘major risks to social cohesion, peace, and stability.’
Her warning came on the back of a UNESCO-commissioned survey which found that more than 85 per cent of people are worried about the impacts of this on their country’s politics.
In the interest of tackling the increasingly worsening issue head-on, experts have begun conducting deeper investigations into misinformation, with the aim of understanding exactly why it is such a substantial amount of the population is so easily swayed by what they consume on the Internet.
Most recently, New York University’s Centre for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), has turned its attention to the phenomenon, publishing a paper in Nature on the impact of search engines’ output on their users – which is relatively under-studied.
Can searching for false news increase belief in misinformation? Yes, by ~20%, according to our new paper out today in @Nature. In addition, this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower quality information.
👇🧵1/https://t.co/vWY7o8XEEh pic.twitter.com/KShuj5xZee
— NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics (@CSMaP_NYU) December 20, 2023
According to their findings, searching to evaluate the truthfulness of fake news or conspiracies (an approach encouraged by technology companies and government agencies) actually compounds the probability that someone will believe it.
The authors point to a known problem in this area called ‘data voids,’ whereby there’s occasionally not a lot of high-quality information to counter misleading headlines or surrounding ‘fringe theories’ which means that when someone sees an article about a certain topic and starts a casual search based on relevant keywords, they might find articles that reaffirm their bias.
In other words, there may be false information out there, but not the corresponding true information to correct it.
‘This points to the danger that ‘data voids’ – areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information – may be playing a consequential role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results,’ says lead-author, Kevin Aslett.
