Want to avoid fake news? Just step away from Google
Searching for information has become instant and effortless — just go to your nearest device, ask Siri or click a few keys. But are we better informed than we were before Google became a verb? A new paper published in Nature hints that we're not. When researchers exposed volunteers to a mix of fake and real news stories, they found people became more prone to being fooled by fake stories after being asked to do an internet search.
That doesn't negate the value of search engines, but as with all technology, there can be unintended consequences. Searches on misleading stories often pull people into a spiral of yet more bad information.
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The Nature paper included results of several studies. In some, people were asked to evaluate news stories that had just broken in the last 48 hours. In one, they saw stories from recent months on Covid-19, spanning scientific, political and economic angles. In some cases, people were randomly assigned to evaluate stories with or without doing their own search, and in others, the same people were asked to evaluate news items before and after a search.
Participants could classify stories as true, false/misleading, or undetermined. Before doing any research, about 30% of people incorrectly labeled false items as true. Searching led to about a 20% increase over that — after doing online research, about 36% of people classified fake news as fact. While subjects could use any search engine, most chose Google.
University of Central Florida social scientist Kevin Aslett, who led the study while at the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU, said people put an incredible amount of trust in search engines — more than they put in the mainstream media. And
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