The internet has been a huge boon for the accessibility of information. There are very few barriers to consuming classic literature or detailed scientific analyses or catalogues of news reports. There is also an exorbitant amount of garbage information, of course, and an entire universe of people who say stuff that they think will get people to click links that will earn themselves money.
While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute. There is an outsize appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us. This is in part because alleged scandals are interesting and in part because Americans like to view themselves as independent analysts of the world around us.
The result is that there is both a supply and a demand for nonsense or appealingly framed errors. Americans who have little trust in the system can easily find something to reinforce their skepticism. They often do.
This month, Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton reported on research released last year that showed how people “doing their own research” on the internet often led them to gain more confidence in untrue information. The paper, titled “Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity,” was written by researchers from the University of Central Florida, New York University and Stanford. Their conclusions were straightforward.
“Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim,” the authors wrote. Instead, they continued: “We present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them.”
Later, they summarize the process, “When individuals search online about misinformation, they are more likely to be exposed to lower-quality information than when individuals search about true news” and “those who are exposed to low-quality information are more likely to believe false/misleading news stories to be true relative to those who are not.” Look for info; see bad info; accept the bad info.
The mechanism is explored at length but, in short, false claims or other rumors often generate fewer hits on Google, meaning searchers are more likely to encounter unreliable information that aligns with their assumptions. (The paper is dense; Benton’s summary is useful.)
There’s probably another factor at play, one not measured in the research: people who believe false claims often do so because those claims comport with their broader ideology or philosophy. Like a parent confronted with allegations of misbehavior by their child, those individuals would presumably be more likely to embrace dubious information supporting their belief than information that corroborates the allegations. The study presented participants with news stories to evaluate without a predisposition. In the real world, that usually doesn’t happen.
One of the ways the modern media environment has made it easier for false information to spread is that false information often adopts the veneer of reliable information. Sites like the Gateway Pundit look like news sites in broad strokes. The Gateway Pundit, despite its history of propagating nonsense, is often treated as legitimate by people of prominence — so its claims are treated as credible.
The same thing happens on cable television. Channels like One America News, which I described shortly after the 2020 election as a “pro-Trump video channel offered with a cable-news-like aesthetic,” elevated numerous baseless claims before being booted from major cable-news systems. Its programming often appeared to be the equivalent of taking Alex Jones’s “Infowars” but setting it in a local television news studio. Doing your own research might lead you to reputable-looking sources that are anything but.
Journalist Michael Hobbes recently remarked upon another emergent pattern, that one can “just adopt the aesthetics of a fact-check or a secret document leak and people will act like you’ve blown the cover off a huge scandal without assessing the underlying claim for themselves.”
This has been central to the effort by House Republicans to allege that President Biden was engaged in impeachable activity. House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has repeatedly offered allegations against Biden that mirror the presentation of lengthy, detailed investigations but then collapse under scrutiny. His supporters, mostly a subset of Donald Trump supporters, say Biden acted inappropriately and are happy to accept allegations as legitimate — while conservative media largely shields them from debunking, for whatever good it would do.
Why did so many Iowa caucus-goers indicate that they thought Biden’s win was illegitimate? Partly because of Trump’s advocacy for that idea, certainly, and in part because of the impermeability of the right-wing media universe. But many, too, cited doing their own research — looking for information on the subject that ended up reinforcing their beliefs.
The most extreme recent example of Americans’ recent willingness to embrace nonsensical claims is the QAnon movement. More muted since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, QAnon adherents say a secret cabal controls the world, with media, entertainment and political elites conspiring — perhaps (some believe) to traffic children and consume a secret chemical that children produce. Many with whom I spoke in 2018 and 2019, though, simply viewed QAnon as an organizing concept for how Trump was battling nefarious, powerful forces on their behalf.
I remember clearly standing outside a Trump rally in New Hampshire in 2019 and speaking to a guy in a QAnon T-shirt. He was very genial and matter-of-fact in his claims. And he suggested that he knew why I didn’t agree with his assumptions.
What I needed, he said, was to do some of my own research.
While confidence in American institutions has been in decline for some time, it’s not hard to imagine how the economic incentives of the internet contribute. There is an outsize appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us. This is in part because alleged scandals are interesting and in part because Americans like to view themselves as independent analysts of the world around us.
The result is that there is both a supply and a demand for nonsense or appealingly framed errors. Americans who have little trust in the system can easily find something to reinforce their skepticism. They often do.
This month, Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton reported on research released last year that showed how people “doing their own research” on the internet often led them to gain more confidence in untrue information. The paper, titled “Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity,” was written by researchers from the University of Central Florida, New York University and Stanford. Their conclusions were straightforward.
“Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim,” the authors wrote. Instead, they continued: “We present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them.”
Later, they summarize the process, “When individuals search online about misinformation, they are more likely to be exposed to lower-quality information than when individuals search about true news” and “those who are exposed to low-quality information are more likely to believe false/misleading news stories to be true relative to those who are not.” Look for info; see bad info; accept the bad info.
The mechanism is explored at length but, in short, false claims or other rumors often generate fewer hits on Google, meaning searchers are more likely to encounter unreliable information that aligns with their assumptions. (The paper is dense; Benton’s summary is useful.)
There’s probably another factor at play, one not measured in the research: people who believe false claims often do so because those claims comport with their broader ideology or philosophy. Like a parent confronted with allegations of misbehavior by their child, those individuals would presumably be more likely to embrace dubious information supporting their belief than information that corroborates the allegations. The study presented participants with news stories to evaluate without a predisposition. In the real world, that usually doesn’t happen.
One of the ways the modern media environment has made it easier for false information to spread is that false information often adopts the veneer of reliable information. Sites like the Gateway Pundit look like news sites in broad strokes. The Gateway Pundit, despite its history of propagating nonsense, is often treated as legitimate by people of prominence — so its claims are treated as credible.
The same thing happens on cable television. Channels like One America News, which I described shortly after the 2020 election as a “pro-Trump video channel offered with a cable-news-like aesthetic,” elevated numerous baseless claims before being booted from major cable-news systems. Its programming often appeared to be the equivalent of taking Alex Jones’s “Infowars” but setting it in a local television news studio. Doing your own research might lead you to reputable-looking sources that are anything but.
Journalist Michael Hobbes recently remarked upon another emergent pattern, that one can “just adopt the aesthetics of a fact-check or a secret document leak and people will act like you’ve blown the cover off a huge scandal without assessing the underlying claim for themselves.”
This has been central to the effort by House Republicans to allege that President Biden was engaged in impeachable activity. House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has repeatedly offered allegations against Biden that mirror the presentation of lengthy, detailed investigations but then collapse under scrutiny. His supporters, mostly a subset of Donald Trump supporters, say Biden acted inappropriately and are happy to accept allegations as legitimate — while conservative media largely shields them from debunking, for whatever good it would do.
Why did so many Iowa caucus-goers indicate that they thought Biden’s win was illegitimate? Partly because of Trump’s advocacy for that idea, certainly, and in part because of the impermeability of the right-wing media universe. But many, too, cited doing their own research — looking for information on the subject that ended up reinforcing their beliefs.
The most extreme recent example of Americans’ recent willingness to embrace nonsensical claims is the QAnon movement. More muted since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, QAnon adherents say a secret cabal controls the world, with media, entertainment and political elites conspiring — perhaps (some believe) to traffic children and consume a secret chemical that children produce. Many with whom I spoke in 2018 and 2019, though, simply viewed QAnon as an organizing concept for how Trump was battling nefarious, powerful forces on their behalf.
I remember clearly standing outside a Trump rally in New Hampshire in 2019 and speaking to a guy in a QAnon T-shirt. He was very genial and matter-of-fact in his claims. And he suggested that he knew why I didn’t agree with his assumptions.
What I needed, he said, was to do some of my own research.
