Evaluating truthfulness of fake news through online searches increases chances of believing misinformation
Dec 2023, phys.org
Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.Data voids are areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality information. They be playing a consequential role in the online search process, sometimes leading to the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results.
But we're not here for the results, we're here for the methods:
In order to study how people use the internet to search for the truthfulness of news, these scientists recruited their participants through Qualtrics and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, "tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies".
So let's make this point now, that these half-robot, semibot, half-automated services, which apparently support some of our behavioral science research, are getting closer to full-robot because the users (the workers, the mechanical turkers) are using AI to help them do their work, and so we may see some of our behavioral science research get lower in quality over time. And you thought there was a reproducability crisis in behavioral science before!
via NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford Law School: Kevin Aslett, Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y
Post Script:
Mechanical Turker is a word and you should probably know it.
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