Googling to find facts can lead people to believe in false news even more, according to a new study published in Nature. Users with low levels of digital literacy struggled the most to find credible information in search engines, were more exposed to low-quality websites, and became more convinced of false narratives presented in the study.
For us in Factiverse, it is an alarming development. The amount of misleading and AI-hallucinated content in search engines has increased just in the past year. Search engines are becoming less effective and greater skills in digital literacy are required from us all.
Scientists involved over 6,000 readers to evaluate news and find relevant evidence in search engines.
Here are their findings:
Problem 1 - Google said so
Scientists found that exposure to lower-quality information in search results is associated with a higher probability of believing misinformation.
Problem 2 - Data voids
We are at the risk of falling into data voids in search engines. Data voids is when the search engine queries turn up little to no results. Often, when verifying news, users in the study only got search results from low-quality sources that supported the false facts, solidifying their belief in false news.
Problem 3 - Digital literacy matters
Individuals with low levels of digital literacy are more likely to fall into these data voids. Lower levels of digital literacy correlate with exposure to unreliable news in search results after conditioning on demographic characteristics.
Previous research has found that individuals with higher levels of digital literacy use better online information-searching strategies, suggesting that those with lower levels of digital literacy may be more likely to use search terms that lead to exposure to low-quality search results.
What are the takeaways
The article concludes that "there is a need for media literacy efforts combatting the effects of misinformation to ground their recommendations in empirically tested interventions and for search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified here."
Article in Nieman Journalism Lab: https://lnkd.in/dgFWt-Ka
And check out our AI-trained digital literacy tool here: editor.factiverse.ai
.png)
.png)
