My TL;DR: Some really interesting conclusions here, though nothing particularly surprising to anyone familiar with SEO practices. In particular the use of SEO t

My TL;DR: Some really interesting conclusions here, though nothing particularly surprising to anyone familiar with SEO practices. In particular the use of SEO techniques to target "data voids" to help own particular terms or phrases that are then used when searching up more information. > Low-quality publishers have been found to use search engine optimization techniques and encourage readers to use specific search queries when searching online by consistently using distinct phrases in their stories and in other media. These terms can guide users to data voids on search engines, where only one point of an unreliable view is represented. Low-quality news sources also often re-use stories from each other, polluting search engine results with other similar non-credible stories… Again, nothing most people here don't already know about the overlap between SEO and misinformation, but it is interesting to see some numbers behind the effect. > We found that, among those who first rated the false/misleading article correctly as false/misleading, 17.6% changed their evaluation to true after being prompted to search online (for comparison, among those who first incorrectly rated the article as true, only 5.8% changed their evaluation to false/misleading after being required to search online). One of the most interesting techniques exposed here is the use of unique terms that can then be easily owned by the misinformation outlets and likely to be used by those searching for more information. > Using the headline/lede as a search query probably produces unreliable results because they contain distinct phrases that only producers of unreliable information use. > The term ‘engineered famine’ in the article is a unique term that is unlikely to be used by reliable sources. An analysis of respondents’ search results found that adding the word ‘engineered’ in front of ‘famine’ changes the search results returned. 0% of search terms that contained the word ‘famine’ without ‘engineered’ in front of it returned unreliable results, whereas 63% of search queries that added ‘engineered’ in front of the word ‘famine’ were exposed to at least one unreliable result. In fact, 83% of all search terms that returned an unreliable result contained the term ‘engineered famine.’