Do Your Own Research? How Searching Online to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase Belief in its Veracity

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to understanding belief in online misinformation, with a particular focus on social networks. However, the dominant role of search engines in the information environment remains underexplored, even though the use of online search to evaluate the veracity of information is a central component of media literacy interventions. Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim. Here, across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them. To shed light on this relationship, we combine survey data with digital trace data collected using a custom browser extension. We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information. Our results indicate that those who search online to evaluate misinformation risk falling into data voids, or informational spaces in which there is corroborating evidence from low-quality sources. We also find consistent evidence that searching online to evaluate news increases belief in true news from low-quality sources, but inconsistent evidence that it increases belief in true news from mainstream sources. In the presentation, I will also present findings from a new in-progress study in which participants utilize an LLM Chatbot (Perplexity) instead of search engines.

Speaker Bio: 

Joshua A. Tucker is Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor Julius Silver Professor, Director of the Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, co-Director of the Center for Social Media and Politics, and Professor of Politics at New York University. His research focuses on the intersection of the digital information environment, social media, and politics.  He is the co-chair of the external academic team for the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study, serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and was the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. An internationally recognized scholar, he has been a keynote speaker for conferences in Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands, and the United States, and has given over 250 invited research presentations at top domestic and international universities and research centers. His research has been published in top general scientific journals, including Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. His most recent books are the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017) and the co-edited Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In 2024, he was included in Clarivate’s 1% Top Cited List for the top cited researchers globally by field.