https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231221012753.htm

Imagine HOW MUCH [they] are working to censor everything real on the web. They just CANNOT HAVE truth about anything important available to the public on the internet, and MUST insure that such truth is consistently labeled "misinformation" or "fake news".

Boy, are [they] fucked.

Italics and bracketed comments added in the excerpts below.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, offer insights into the impact of search engines' output on their users -- a relatively under-studied area.

"Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation -- and by notable amounts," says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper's authors.

The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs -- in the study, the researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

. . . The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:

• The effect of SOTEN [searching online to evaluate news] on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article's publication (false popular articles included stories on COVID-19 vaccines, the Trump impeachment proceedings, and climate events)
• Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual's evaluation after they had already assessed the veracity of a news story
• The effect of SOTEN months after publication
• The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a salient topic with significant news coverage -- in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic

A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results [i.e., censored versus truthful results] on belief in misinformation. By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, the researchers could identify how the quality of these search results may affect users' belief in the misinformation being evaluated.

The study's source credibility ratings were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.

Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation. This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later. This finding suggests that the passage of time -- and ostensibly opportunities for fact checks to enter the information ecosystem -- does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true. Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.