You expect the newest link to be the safest

The reasoning behind it

It starts from something true. Addresses do go stale, so a page updated recently is more likely to carry a set that still answers. People then take one step too far and turn a claim about working into a claim about safe. Those are separate properties and they come from different places.

The step is easy to miss because of what happens the moment before. Somebody has just failed to reach the market. They are annoyed. They want an address that works now. Recency is the only quality visible from the results page without opening anything, so recency becomes the filter.

Why novelty favours the wrong side

Think about what a page pushing a bad address needs. It cannot have a long record, because a long record would have accumulated complaints. It cannot have a reputation, because reputations are earned by being checkable over time. What it can have, instantly and at no cost, is a fresh timestamp, current-sounding wording and a claim to be more up to date than everything above it. Novelty is the cheapest signal to fake and the most expensive one to earn honestly.

There is a second effect. A page that has carried the same wethenorth market link for a long time has been read by many people, some of whom would have said something if the address had gone wrong. That silence is weak evidence, but it is evidence, and it is the kind that only accumulates with age. A page published four hours ago has none of it and cannot have any.

A better ordering

1. A signed statement, if one exists, checked against a key you already held. Age is irrelevant here because the signature does the work.
2. A source you have used before, still under the same name, still saying the same things.
3. Agreement between sources that clearly do not copy each other.
4. Everything else, including whichever page claims to be the most recently updated.

Notice that recency does not appear on that list until the bottom. It is not worthless. It is just the last thing to reach for rather than the first, and it should never override the three above it.

The one case where new matters

If a source you already trust publishes an updated set, that is new information and you should take it. The difference is the direction you arrived from. You went to a known source and found something new, rather than searching for something new and deciding to trust whoever produced it. Same freshness, opposite meaning.

Related: the search result is the real link and a scam looks like a scam.