Do your own research and fall for fake news more often

In 2024, countries with a combined population of 4 billion people are going to be holding elections. Propaganda and disinformation are not particularly new phenomena in these contexts, but the way they spread has changed. With the internet and social media having established themselves as a part of our daily lives - platforms where a broad range of outlets and individuals can distribute information and ideas to lots of people very quickly - it can be difficult to know what to trust. And research by Kevin Aslett of the University of Central Florida and colleagues suggests it’s even more difficult to identify fake news than you might think.

Their study in Nature found that online searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increased the probability of being deceived by 19%. James Tytko got in touch with regular Naked Neuroscientist Francis Madden to find out more…

Francis - In monitoring the terms that people use to evaluate news articles, some people actually just copied and pasted the headline of the article into Google and, of people who did those, around 77% received back at least one unreliable news link. Whereas other people, who didn't directly copy and paste the headline or the URL of the article, 21% of those people had at least one unreliable news link.

James - So if you were going to advise someone who's trying to evaluate the truthfulness of a news article, you'd tell them to re-articulate the terms of the article to have a better chance of avoiding more misinformation down the line?

Francis - Yeah, exactly. That would avoid something called a 'data void,' what the researchers have called it, which is where if you use search terms unique to misinformation, then you're more likely to expose yourself to more low quality information. An example of that is a headline in one of the articles they use which is, the US faces engineered famine as Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates could lead to widespread hunger. The term 'engineered famine' is quite unique to conspiracy theorists, and it's unlikely to be used by mainstream media outlets. So if you add the word 'engineered' in front of 'famine' when you're searching to verify the article, 63% of the search queries led to at least one unreliable result. Whereas if you just search the word famine and COVID-19, none of the results were unreliable.

James - Did the authors of this study take into account the political leanings of the participants, or their vulnerability to be taken in by conspiracy theories? I'm just wondering if what you want to believe has a big difference on the way you are searching on the internet?

Francis - So they actually examined the ideology of the participants, and people from different sides of the political spectrum might deem different things fake news. But, interestingly, they found that the increase in probability of believing fake news from evaluating it applies to everybody across the political spectrum and not just the left or the right.

James - Once you get sucked into one of these data voids, it can be more difficult to then eventually reach the truth. Prevention is better than cure in this case. What can we do to ensure that, at an earlier stage, something's sounding in our brain to say, perhaps this is not true?

Francis - That's actually relevant to the research being done at Cambridge University by Sander van der Linden and John Roozenbeek and colleagues, and they've been researching something called 'inoculation' against misinformation. This theory goes that we can build resistance to misinformation by giving ourselves a smaller dose that we can clearly identify as misinformation, and then apply that critical thinking to actual fake news articles. Because it can be hard for even professionals to evaluate whether an article is true or false. By showing participants videos of quite benign scenarios, like clips of Family Guy or clips of Star Wars, to highlight examples of the techniques used by misinformation outlets like emotionally manipulative rhetoric or false dichotomies or ad hominem attacks, by showing a trivial example of that, it can stimulate awareness such that when those participants are exposed to actual fake news articles, then they can identify that they are fake. If you go to a website called inoculation.science you can watch the videos they've used in their studies and play some games that they've created to inoculate yourself against misinformation.