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How online misinformation exploits ‘information voids’ – and what to do about it
In 2024’s super election year, providers of online search engines and their users need to be especially aware of how online misinformation can seem all too believable.
A study in Nature 1 last month highlights a previously underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon: the existence of data voids, information spaces that lack evidence, into which people searching to check the accuracy of controversial topics can easily fall. Google’s algorithms rank news items by taking into account various measures of quality, such as how much a piece of content aligns with the consensus of expert sources on a topic. But there can be additional approaches to preventing people falling into data voids of misinformation and disinformation, as Google itself acknowledges and as Aslett and colleagues show.
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