Checking fake news online is actually making some people believe it, a new study has found.
It's not hard to find fake news, especially with the internet. But, you'd think a simple Google search could clear up any misinformation. New findings published in Nature, however, actually find that the opposite is true.
"Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation—and by notable amounts," Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper's authors, said in a statement.
Sanderson, with fellow researcher Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP and colleagues, undertook a series of experiments to reach these findings.
They studied the effect of searching online to evaluate news in five different scenarios. First, the effect of searching online to evaluate news on the belief of false or misleading news, just two days after publication of said news.
Then, they tested whether this type of search changed an individual's evaluation of the news.
They also tested the effect of a search months after publication, as well as its effect on recent news on a topic with significant coverage—in this case, the researchers used news on the Covid-19 pandemic.
The fifth scenario involved analyzing a survey alongside web tracking data, to test how different search engines affected a person's belief of fake news.
Overall, they discovered that there was a drastic increase in the belief of misinformation, after participants had searched online to evaluate news.
They also discovered that time did not matter—this was the case two days after publication as well as months after publication.
"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," Aslett said in a statement.
The study also found that those who use a lower quality search engine were more likely to believe the fake news, the study reported.
"The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research," Joshua A. Tucker, a professor of politics and co-director of CSMaP, another of the paper's authors, said in a press release.
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