Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.
Doing your own research isn’t the problem, it’s how you go about it that is, some will just believe whatever bs static gets put infont of them without understanding the data, how it was collected, etc. and some will blatantly cherry pick to feed their own bias.
And some just define “research” as clicking the next video in the recommendation list, a list carefully crafted by an algorithm to keep people engaged by feeding more of the same.
Yeah, it’s not an inherently bad thing.
A big part of the problem is that people run to journals without understanding their purpose; publication is just the first step in peer review.
And then when people do a ctrl+f to search for a “gotcha,” they also eliminate all of the nuance and caveats that really explain the potential finding.