New findings from a study published in Nature and led by UCF’s School of Politics, Security and International Affairs Assistant Professor Kevin Aslett shed light on the ways that conducting your own online research can be misleading.
Aslett worked with a team of fellow researchers from New York University and Stanford University over a span of five years. The study was born out of curiosity about how online research helps to detect fake news. Initially, the researchers hypothesized that conducting research would help to identify fake news. However, they were surprised when they found the opposite result.
Aslett and the research team asked more than 3,000 respondents in six different experiments to rate the accuracy of news stories using search engines. The results showed that using search engines like Google to evaluate false news sources led to a 19% greater likelihood of rating false claims as true. This means that doing their own research can actually mislead the person trying to verify the information.
“We discovered that contrary to conventional wisdom, searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation actually increases belief in misinformation,” Aslett says.
This means searching online to figure out if something is false can increase the likelihood of someone believing it.
“This is concerning because if we’re going to encourage people to search online, our hope is that this is going to help them identify the veracity of that news,” Aslett says.
In...
A recent review of developments in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors highlights a $290 million penalty imposed on CVS Caremark under the False Claims Act, widespread non-compliance with HI...