Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.
Also, the people “doing their own research” often aren’t intelligent enough to know what is real versus what is made-up garbage, and are gullible enough to believe whatever they happen to read.
Whatever they read that reaffirms their biases, especially.