Gauging reference and source bias over time: how Russia’s partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated an anti-regime protest event

Abstract

Massive efforts have been dedicated to studying political search engine bias in democratic contexts, and a growing body of literature has scrutinized search engine censorship in authoritarian China. By contrast, very little is known still about political search engine bias within Russia's slightly more open authoritarian media system. In order to fill in this gap, this study asks: How has Russia's leading partially state-controlled search engine Yandex mediated a large-scale anti-regime protest event (anti-corruption protests on 26 March 2017) in the twenty months thereafter? The study analyzes a data set of 30,471 results, retrieved in regular intervals for nine query terms from four platforms:Yandex.ru, News.yandex.ru, Google.ru, and News.google.ru. As the findings demonstrate, both Yandex algorithms (by comparison with their Google counterparts) referred users to significantly fewer websites that contained information about the protest event (reference bias). In a similar vein, both Yandex algorithms forwarded users to fewer websites that regularly featured criticism of Russia's authoritarian leadership (source bias). Moreover, Yandex algorithms tended to be particularly biased in the event's immediate aftermath. In the first week after the protests, for instance, the difference in reference ratios between Google and Yandex Web searches were massive (mean difference: 23% points), while they were less pronounced during the remaining time period studied (mean difference: 7% points). These findings are highly politically relevant because rapid diffusion of information about protest events can be considered of key importance to further protest mobilization.

Search engine manipulation to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda

“…Several audit studies have been conducted where researchers query terms on multiple search engines and compare the rankings of relevant results. In one audit, Kravets and Toepfl (2021) found that Yandex returned far fewer websites than Google with information on anti-regime Russian protests. An additional cross-country audit found Google to be effective at suppressing pro-Kremlin content in five countries (Toepfl et al, 2021).…”

“…In one audit, Kravets and Toepfl (2021) found that Yandex returned far fewer websites than Google with information on anti-regime Russian protests. An additional cross-country audit found Google to be effective at suppressing pro-Kremlin content in five countries (Toepfl et al, 2021). Additionally, one audit compared Google and Yandex rankings of content related to Alexei Navalny and found that Google promoted opposition sources more frequently than Yandex (Makhortykh et al, 2022).…”

A story of (non)compliance, bias, and conspiracies: How Google and Yandex represented Smart Voting during the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia

“…Since Yandex is a Russian domestic corporation, it is generally thought to be more responsive to government pressure (Daucé & Loveluck, 2021) while Google is seen by many Russian NGOs as a protector of civil liberties (Bronnikova & Zaytseva, 2021) Compared with Google, Yandex was more intensively targeted by Russian regulatory mechanisms (Wijermars, 2021) and demonstrated more politically biased performance during periods of political contention (Kravets & Toepfl, 2021). However, the Russian authorities also put increasing pressure on Google as demonstrated by the growing number of requests for removing results from its search, particularly since the second half of 2020 (Figure 1).…”

Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars

“…The situation is further complicated by the tendency of some search engines (e.g. Yandex, a Russian search engine) to amplify pro-Kremlin narratives (Kravets and Toepfl, 2021), which can have implications for their curation of memory-related information. To investigate the performance of search engines under these circumstances, we conducted a comparative audit of search outputs for the query 'Holodomor' in Latin and Cyrillic script for four major search engines: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Yandex.…”