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.
A lot of those data voids are the result of the academic publishing industry too.
There’s another thing I hadn’t thought much about, but did see a bit during COVID lockdowns. People would stumble upon some paper published by whomever that was on a seemingly reputable domain, and without knowing anything about the subject claim that it proved things it didn’t and then reference those papers as proof.
Then they’d post on their own blog(s) run up some SEO, and boom, you got the beginning of a rabbit hole.
Excellent point.