Doing your own """""research""""" without having the knowledge to critically think about what you're reading, to critically evaluate the data collection and statistics and limitations of the dataset is NOT true research. Instead, what you're doing most of the time is finding the articles that already confirm the biases you have in your head. It's hard to completely avoid confirmation bias because we're all human, but without the tools to ask the right questions in good faith, some are a lot more prone to it than others.

I've spent about 5 years total in two different [actual] research labs. Do you know how long it took me to grasp the basic literature review that is required to form an understanding of the field I'm in? Everyone's different, but for your reference it took me over a year of reading and re-reading papers to synthesize a comprehensive picture of things. And that's just the picture I needed to get started in the field. Every paper I read after that required me to adjust my understanding of things yet again. And that's WITH assistance and insight from other trained scientists.

So I think it's silly when people decide to go based off of their own """research.""" Sure, you can question the authorities and experts in the field, but be prepared to hear their answer because it took them years of work to develop that answer.