Nieman Lab: “A new study asked thousands to evaluate the accuracy of news articles — both real and fake — by doing some research online. But for many, heading to Google led them farther from the truth, not closer… Media literacy proponents often advocate doing your own research — emphasis on the search, since Google is typically Tool No. 1 here — as a weapon against misinformation. Search horizontally, they say — opening new tabs to seek confirmation or debunking — rather than keep scrolling vertically. But what if, instead of yanking you toward the light, doing your own research leads you deeper into the information dark? That’s the question raised by an interesting new paper that was published over the winter break in Nature. Its title is “Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity,” and its authors are Kevin Aslett, Zeve Sanderson, William Godel, Nathaniel Persily, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker. (Lead author Aslett is at the University of Central Florida and Nate Persily is at Stanford. The other four authors are all at NYU.) Here’s the abstract; emphases, as usual, are mine:…Here, across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them. To shed light on this relationship, we combine survey data with digital trace data collected using a custom browser extension. We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information….”