Search Engine to Warn People About Visiting Sites That Contain Conspiracy Theories?

[Ed Jewett]

Stalinist Stanford "Visiting Scholar" Wants Search Engines to Warn People About Visiting Sites That Contain Conspiracy Theories, Browsers Should Flag Information That Does Not Conform to Mainstream Views

January 24th, 2012Via: Slate:
Well, perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potentialrather than existentmembers.
Today, anyone who searches for "is global warming real" or "risks of vaccination" or "who caused 9/11?" on Google or Bing is just a few clicks away from joining one of such communities. Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
The options aren't many. One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in redperhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source. The trick here is to come up with a database of disputed claims that itself would correspond to the latest consensus in modern sciencea challenging goal that projects like "Dispute Finder" are tackling head on.
The secondand not necessarily mutually exclusiveoption is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries?Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
Research Credit: apethought
Posted in Elite, Perception Management, Social Engineering, Technology