this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] SuddenDownpour -2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

As time goes on, Google further prioritizes results from far right think tanks, as they are paying for better visibility. Unless you are specifically searching through Google Scholar, trusting the first results of any given search has increasingly become a coin flip.

Edit: Ok, some evidence for the downvoters. Google "are hormone blockers harmful". Chances are that this page will appear among the very first results, if not the first one. Most people will jump to trust an organization called "American College of Pediatricians", as it's a very similar name to actual professional organizations such as the American College of Physicians. But if you look it up on Wikipedia:

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a socially conservative advocacy group of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals in the United States, founded in 2002.[1][2] The group's primary focus is advocating against abortion rights and against rights for gay, queer, and transgender people. ACPeds promotes conversion therapy and purity culture.[3][4][1] As of 2022, its membership has been reported at about 700 physicians.[5][6][1]

(...) ACPeds has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for pushing "anti-LGBTQ junk science".

So it's basically a relatively small organization, focused on political goals rather than offering information from a scientific or professional point of view, yet it has managed to get itself among the very first positions of the search engine. I've had a people whose intelligence I would usually not put into question regurgitate these talking points because they did decide to put a little bit of work to inform themselves on an issue they knew nothing about and ended up on one of these pages, due to the reasons the article at OP is mentioning.