Who Provides the Largest Megaphone? The Role of Google News in Promoting Russian State-Affiliated News Sources

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• arXiv

Abstract

The Internet has not only digitized but also democratized information access across the globe. This gradual but path-breaking move to online information propagation has resulted in search engines playing an increasingly prominent role in shaping access to human knowledge. When an Internet user enters a query, the search engine sorts through the hundreds of billions of possible webpages to determine what to show. Google dominates the search engine market, with Google Search surpassing 80% market share globally every year of the last decade. Only in Russia and China do Google competitors claim more market share, with approximately 60% of Internet users in Russia preferring Yandex (compared to 40% in favor of Google) and more than 80% of China’s Internet users accessing Baidu as of 2022. Notwithstanding this long-standing regional variation in Internet search providers, there is limited research showing how these providers compare in terms of propagating state-sponsored information. Our study fills this research gap by focusing on Russian cyberspace and examining how Google and Yandex’s search algorithms rank content from Russian state-controlled media (hereon, RSM) outlets. This question is timely and of practical interest given widespread reports indicating that RSM outlets have actively engaged in promoting Kremlin propaganda in the lead-up to, and in the aftermath of, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Citation

Erhardt, K., & Khanna, S. (2023). Who Provides the Largest Megaphone? The Role of Google News in Promoting Russian State-Affiliated News Sources. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09834.

@article{
    erhardt2023provides,
    title={Who Provides the Largest Megaphone? The Role of Google News in Promoting Russian State-Affiliated News Sources},
    author={Erhardt, Keeley and Khanna, Saurabh},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09834},
    year={2023}
}