Google U. And It’s Consequences

We now live in an era of self-identified experts. People love pretending like they know what they are talking about. So many people are out pretending as though they have a medical degree in pathology, political science, or law. They go out on social media, blogs, and YouTube spreading misinformation (or at the very least obscuring context).

The worst part is that there are experts on the internet ready to give out information to help people out. But it’s up to us, the user, to cut the wheat from the chaff. We need to gather the context and information, which is another point Verified by Caulfield and Wineburg attempts to cover.

First, we have to know how search engine picks results. The answer is that we really do not know. What we do know is that its not what has the most information. Instead it is what is optimized for a search engine. Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as:

“a cat and mouse game with legions of site owners who try to outgame the algorithms by manipulating keywords, planting links on other sites, spamming, reconfiguring their content, and doing everything imaginable to get a leg up on the competition” (93).

So, they recommend to first STOP and take in the results of your search. Look at what the results are saying. Hopefully this prevents you from clicking the first result (which may end up being an Alt-right blog). This process hopefully lets you get more context before diving into a specific web-page.

Another recommendation is to use the other tabs, such as the “Books” tab. This can be especially helpful if the first couple of results are very heated.

This will help you “find something reliable rather than clicking away at the first thing that catches your eye. (100).

This brings us back to the issue of experts. People on the internet lie, whether intentionally or not. One of the best ways to do so is to pretend to be an expert, when in reality you have a fringe belief. So, Verified recommends finding other sources.

Through this you’ll see a wide variety of theories. Briefly you may see competing theories, majority/minority theories (Both are good there is just a split), consensus, uncertainty, and Fringe. Fringe is what we care about here, being viewpoints NOT accepted or supported at all.

Our goal is too look at a wide variety of experts, or find those that can be trusted (such as a very well known reporter known for looking at the medical field). Hopefully this can help avoid fringe opinions.

Lastly, they cover trust compression. This is the habit of looking at a wide variety of opinions and going “well, guess there is no answer?” Through this we look at an accepted opinions and put them on the same level as fringe ones.

Let’s use an example. The anti-vax movement. There is wide agreement on the safety and effectiveness on vaccines. If you do not believe me, employ SIFT to find your own information! If we were to use truth compression, we would walk away saying, “well I just don’t know, seems there is a lot of disagreement.” The disagreements are coming from fringe groups, not respected experts.

In fact, I could go over how terrible the first study was that tried to find a connection between vaccines and autism, but you can see that information on your own. I recommend looking at Andrew Wakefield’s Wikipedia page or at Brian Deer’s (an investigative reporter known for his work on reporting medical controversies) documentary (which he has on YouTube for free).