Unironically, a team of U.S. researchers did their own research to show us that doing our own research will make us conspiracy theorists.
The results of the study showed that 19% of participants were more likely to believe "fake news" and become conspiracy theory nuts after they had performed an online search to find the truth.
Kevin Aslett, assistant professor in the School of Politics, Security and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida, and a lead author of the paper published in Nature said,
"In terms of political consequences, increased belief in misinformation has the potential to increase political cynicism and apathy towards politics, lower trust in reliable media sources, increase polarization [and] motivate political violence," Aslett told Forbes. He references the events of January 6, 2021, in which a mob attacked the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., saying "these consequences weaken democracy."
Not our De MahH CraH See!!!
Misinformed beliefs can also threaten public health, such as in the case of vaccine misinformation, or be used by powerful interest groups to manipulate public sentiment against climate action measures, such as the development of renewable energy projects.
Those who doubted the efficacy of the Covid vaccine or disagree with climate hysteria are "misinformed."
Aslett blames the people trying to find the truth instead of just trusting the media.
He says that it has to do with their search terms.
The example given is from this headline "U.S. faces engineered famine as COVID lockdowns and vax mandates could lead to widespread hunger, unrest this winter," which the study rated false.
The article in question was from 2021 when supply chains had left grocery shelves all but empty, and people were literally going hungry. I mean the people were calling the president "Bareshelves Biden" because his administration kept exacerbating the shortages.
However, the researchers note that when respondents searched "engineered famine," they were likely to get results from "unreliable" news sources.
Now to be fair, there were certainly some crazy folks out there trying to make a buck off the lockdowns and government overreach.
I had family members try to convince me to give them $15,000, so my family and I could move into an underground bunker in South Dakota with them, where we could all share an 8'X10' space until Biden left office or the air ran out.
So while there's some merit in the idea of search terms leading someone down a bad rabbit trail, as you might have guessed already ...
... their research has some issues.
The first issue is that the research required participants to download a "logging" plugin that would record their internet and computer activity, which preselects for a certain kind of participant. Someone would have to be gullible enough to download a logging program on their device, and that someone is probably also gullible enough to find themselves trapped in an underground bunker with no air.
The second issue is that the research relied on NewsGuard to determine what was "true" and "false." If you're not familiar with NewsGuard, it's a Department of Defense funded news-rating service.
In NewsGuard's far-left world, the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop is still just a Russian hoax, and Not the Bee only scores 62.5/100 for truthfulness.
To which our fearless leader, Dan Dillon, said,
We're aware that NewsGuard has given our site a laughably low trust score. It's not good for our business, but we take this rating as a badge of honor and an indication that we don't align with the mainstream narrative that they support, nor comply with the censorship complex they actively reinforce.
Just for reference, neutral fact checking site Media Fact Check gives Not the Bee a High Credibility rating with 0 failed fact checks in the last 5 years, so we've got that going for us.
Humorously, while the study would rate Not the Bee stories as questionable and false, it included stories from the Palmer Report, a far-left site notorious for pushing false conspiracies, as reliably true.
All that to say, the researchers may have proved their own point. In doing their own research, they have fallen prey to leftist conspiracy theories.
(BlueAnon is alive and well, fam.)
Of course, the authors of the study have two solutions they think need to be implemented to fix the perceived problem: Reeducation programs like this one and more Big Tech censorship!!
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