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.
The issue is that they’re incorrectly using the word “research.” They just googled something, found an answer, and that was it. It’s even more egregious than when they have an idea they think sounds interesting and they call it a “theory.” Imagine if you opened the latest edition of Nature and saw a research article that just said “We wondered if ducks could talk, so we googled it, and found a blog post that said they did, so there you go.”