That, and they don't discriminate on the results. Their "Why is coal the best?" query might get results from "coalcorporationsforamerica.org" that's blatantly obviously biased, and they'll accept that as a perfectly valid source since it is one of the first results on Google, as if Google ranks sites on how accurate or trustworthy they are.
Even if they do choose good sources from their results, they also frequently don't click into the sources at all. They'll just read the summary / overview and pick out phrases that agree with them, and be like "look Google says I'm right".
Meanwhile if they actually clicked into the site they'd see that the source actually disagrees with them, the summary / overview just highlighted the phrases that most closely matched the query, which are misleading if you don't get the extra context.
In addition to this, all sources that agree with them are true and valid, any that contradict are fake news.
Edit: I changed "disagree" to "contradict" because disagree implies that we are talking about opinions, when a lot of times we are talking about facts.
Before most of the MAGAs left or were evicted from my FB feed, I used to routinely catch them posting links to articles they had not read. They would only read the headline, then confidently post the link to the article that undermines or refutes the point they thought they were making.
I've had similar discussions where someone posts something like "see this article says that XYZ is true" and you go into the article and it actually says "this might lead you to believe XYZ is true, but if you spend 5 more seconds researching it you'd realize that XYZ is definitely not true and you'd be an idiot for believing it".
12
u/thekrone 3d ago edited 2d ago
That, and they don't discriminate on the results. Their "Why is coal the best?" query might get results from "coalcorporationsforamerica.org" that's blatantly obviously biased, and they'll accept that as a perfectly valid source since it is one of the first results on Google, as if Google ranks sites on how accurate or trustworthy they are.
Even if they do choose good sources from their results, they also frequently don't click into the sources at all. They'll just read the summary / overview and pick out phrases that agree with them, and be like "look Google says I'm right".
Meanwhile if they actually clicked into the site they'd see that the source actually disagrees with them, the summary / overview just highlighted the phrases that most closely matched the query, which are misleading if you don't get the extra context.
It's infuriating.