Who are the plotters behind the pandemic? Comparing Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across five key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication

Toepfl, Florian; Kravets, Daria; Ryzhova, Anna; Beseler, Arista

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2022.2065213

Cited by 15 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Bakhtin, 1981 [1975]. , Gruzd and Mai, 2020 , Jenks, 2022 , Kristeva and 1980, , 1967 , Martin and R., White, P.R.R., , 2005 , Sturm and Albrecht, 2021 , Toepfl et al, 2022 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting polyvocal scorn in #CovidConspiracy tweets: The orchestration of voices in humorous responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Dynel

Zappavigna

2023

Discourse, Context & Media

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Bakhtin, 1981 [1975]. , Gruzd and Mai, 2020 , Jenks, 2022 , Kristeva and 1980, , 1967 , Martin and R., White, P.R.R., , 2005 , Sturm and Albrecht, 2021 , Toepfl et al, 2022 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting polyvocal scorn in #CovidConspiracy tweets: The orchestration of voices in humorous responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Dynel

Zappavigna

2023

Discourse, Context & Media

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…While the authors do not speculate why the algorithm for each country generates different content, they suggest that further research is needed to determine Yandex’s role as an ‘information tool of the Kremlin’ (p. 24) in the contexts outside of Russia. To fill this gap, this study is the first to systematically investigate how Yandex’s web search algorithms contribute to spreading pro-Kremlin content in Belarus, one of the key target countries of Russia’s foreign influence efforts ( Toepfl et al., 2022 ).…”

Section: Russia’s Informational Influence Abroad: Yandex As An Underr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Considering the importance of search engines in the digitalised news-gathering process ( Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018 ; Wallace, 2018 ), the presence of CTs in top search results could induce the formation of conspiracy beliefs. Yet, the role of search engines in promoting CTs has received little scholarly attention (for similar claims see Bandy, 2021 ), with a few notable exceptions in recent years ( Hussein et al, 2020 ; Toepfl et al, 2022 , 2023 ; Urman et al, 2021b ). For instance, Hussein et al (2020) investigated how YouTube’s search engine promotes misinformative content.…”

Section: How Search Engines Contribute To the Spread Of Conspiracy Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, Toepfl et al (2022) —in an analysis that drew on the codebook and broader data collection infrastructure also used for this study—compared the presence of COVID-19 CTs in Google’s search results in response to local language queries across four key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication (Belarus, Germany, Ukraine and the US) and Russia in November 2020. They found relatively low proportions of conspiratorial content present in Google’s search results, which varied between 14% in Belarus and 3% in Ukraine.…”

Section: How Search Engines Contribute To the Spread Of Conspiracy Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this period, we collected the top 20 results every three days, which resulted in 11 search rounds. In every round, we deployed three search terms that targeted CTs speculating about the origins of COVID-19 with increasing ‘specificity’ ( Toepfl et al, 2022 : 3): ‘coronavirus’, ‘coronavirus origin’ and ‘coronavirus biological weapon’. Although Belarus has two official languages, Russian and Belarusian, we conducted queries only in Russian, since the majority (71%) of Belarusians reportedly use Russian as their main means of communication ( Belstat, 2020 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational influence abroad. To do so, we conduct a comparative algorithm audit of Google and Yandex in Belarus, examining the visibility and narratives of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories in their search results. By manually analysing the content of 1320 search results collected in mid-April to mid-May 2020, we find that, compared with Google, (1) Yandex retrieves significantly more conspiratorial content (2) that close to exclusively suspects US plotters to be behind the pandemic, even though the virus spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan across the globe.

show abstract

The elusive search engine: How search engine use is reflected in survey reports

Andersson

Sundin

2023

Asso for Info Science & Tech

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The overall aim of this article is to contribute to a research‐based understanding of the increasing invisibility of web search engines in society and to discussions about the potential impact of this invisibility. It examines how search engine use and online search activities are represented in national and regional reports on internet habits and experience published by public foundations and policy institutes. The elusiveness of search engines is understood through a theoretical perspective from infrastructure theory. National survey reports on internet habits and experience from the United States, UK, and Sweden from 2015 to 2021 are analyzed. The article shows how difficult it is to gain insights into how people search online and the role search engines play in everyday life. The nature of the survey report, which is often used to inform national policy, risks exacerbating the invisibility of search engines: what cannot be measured cannot be discussed at the policy level. This invisibility can lead to insufficient attention being paid to search engines, including their uses and effects, in legislation, in school education, and in the general formation of public knowledge about search engines in society.

show abstract

Who are the plotters behind the pandemic? Comparing Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Google search results across five key target countries of Russia’s foreign communication

Cited by 15 publications

References 25 publications

Enacting polyvocal scorn in #CovidConspiracy tweets: The orchestration of voices in humorous responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Enacting polyvocal scorn in #CovidConspiracy tweets: The orchestration of voices in humorous responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic

The elusive search engine: How search engine use is reflected in survey reports

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About