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Zeynep Tufekci writes: "What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales." 
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Donald Barclay writes: "Thirty or 40 years ago, a student writing a research paper on the topic of acid rain might have needed to decide whether an article from a scientific journal like Nature was a more appropriate source than an article from a popular magazine like Time.
Today’s students, however, must know how to distinguish between articles published by genuine scholarly journals and those churned out by look-alike predatory and fake journals that falsely claim to be scholarly and peer-reviewed."
Mary Reilley Clark's insight:
There's a link in this article to the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education from the Association of College and Research Libraries. Barclay notes that, "This new approach asks students to put in the time and effort required to determine the credibility and appropriateness of each information source for the use to which they intend to put it." If we in the primary and secondary libraries haven't educated students on how to do this, I don't think they'll have the mental stamina to do it in college! This makes me even more excited about the workshop our local state university is offering to get secondary library staff to understand what info literacy skills college students need, and to design collaborative lessons to help our students strengthen (or build) those skills.
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Rebecca Hersher writes: "The most emphatic statements on Roof's behalf came from defense attorney David Bruck. For weeks, the prosecution had presented evidence that Roof is a white supremacist whose violent racism drove him to kill black people. Bruck asked the jury to consider how the 22-year-old came to believe the things he did. As NPR reported: " 'There is hatred all right, and certainly racism, but it goes a lot further than that,' [Bruck] said." 'Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet. That's it. ... 'He is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans and facts — bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.' " Bruck was referring to Roof's assertion in his confession and in a manifesto that a Google search shaped his beliefs.
Mary Reilley Clark's insight:
I'd be interested to hear students' reactions to this article. We talk a lot about Google search results, and how first page results doesn't mean best results(and I'm not happy that the Stormfront website on Martin Luther King still shows up on the first page of Google's results.) What a horrific example of what can happen when someone can't think critically about information they're exposed to.
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I use YouTube purely for recreational purposes--and the occasional "how do I replace [insert random broken household item]"-- but I just spent some time looking at various controversial topics. Sure enough, click on one anti-vaccination video, and all the recommended videos become anti-vaxx, even though when I did a simple [vaccination] search, the first page of videos were predominately pro-vaccination.
When I teach about doing Internet research I always talk about staying focused, since it's so easy to get distracted by irrelevant sites. My example is always YouTube. I ask students to raise their hand if they've watched a YouTube video for fun. Then I ask them to raise their hand if they stopped at that one video. No one does. Now, instead of just emphasizing why that rabbit hole can cost them research time, I'll be asking students to be more aware of where that rabbit hole might take them.