Search & Verify: Misinformation and source evaluations in Internet search results

In response to online misinformation, source rating services evaluate thousands of popular websites, mark them as reputable or disreputable, and provide detailed information explaining their evaluations. In this paper, we examine the effects of news source evaluations by experts as well as crowd-sourced information (i.e., Wikipedia) on beliefs in political news that appears in Internet search results. Through two online experiments, we inves-tigate the effects of providing a simple source-evaluation flag or a flag with more detailed supporting information explaining the evaluation. We found that negative flags from expert fact-checkers reduced users' beliefs, and supporting information had no additional effect; in contrast, positive flags required information beyond the simple flag to have maximum effectiveness. Positive and negative crowd-sourced information had similar effects but was weaker than evaluations from experts. Thus, we conclude that providing additional information to support source evaluation flags is important to give users confidence in reputable websites.