this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
664 points (96.1% liked)

Technology

59719 readers
2645 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
664
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]
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 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.