Online information of vaccines: information quality is an ethical responsibility of search engines
The fact that internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines' approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they return. We analyzed the first 30 webpages returned searching 'vaccines autism' in English, Spanish, Italian and French. The results show that alternative search engines (Duckduckgo, Ecosia, Qwant, Swisscows and Mojeek) may return more anti-vaccine pages (10 to 53 percent) than Google.com (zero). Some localized versions of Google, however, returned more anti-vaccine webpages (up to 10 percent) than Google.com. Our study suggests that designing a search engine that is privacy savvy and avoids issues with filter bubbles that can result from user tracking is necessary but insufficient; instead, mechanisms should be developed to test search engines from the perspective of information quality (particularly for health-related webpages), before they can be deemed trustworthy providers of public health information.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
VaccineLies: A Natural Language Resource for Learning to Recognize Misinformation about the COVID-19 and HPV Vaccines
Billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, but many remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccinati…
MisinformationSelf-selection of Information and Belief Update: An Experiment on COVID-19 Vaccine Information Acquisition
Rational information acquisition theory predicts that people select the more informative information. Thus, people's beliefs will be more persuaded by the information they select. We test the prediction in a critical rea…
Identifying the Adoption or Rejection of Misinformation Targeting COVID-19 Vaccines in Twitter Discourse
Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination.…
MisinformationCoVaxxy: A Collection of English-Language Twitter Posts about COVID-19 Vaccines
With a substantial proportion of the population currently hesitant to take the COVID-19 vaccine, it is important that people have access to accurate information. However, there is a large amount of low-credibility inform…
Automatic Detection of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation with Graph Link Prediction
Enormous hope in the efficacy of vaccines became recently a successful reality in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, vaccine hesitancy, fueled by exposure to social media misinformation about COVID-19 vacc…
Link PredictionMisinformation