Where the Earth is flat and 9/11 is an inside job: A comparative algorithm audit of conspiratorial information in web search results

TL;DR

This study systematically compares how five major search engines distribute conspiratorial content across different queries, locations, and times, revealing that most engines tend to prioritize conspiracy-promoting results, potentially amplifying misinformation.

Contribution

It provides the first comparative algorithm audit of conspiratorial information in search results across multiple engines, locations, and time periods, highlighting systematic biases.

Findings

Most search engines, except Google, frequently display conspiracy-promoting results.

Conspiracy content mainly comes from social media and dedicated conspiracy websites.

Search results are consistent across locations and time, indicating systematic prioritization.

Abstract

Web search engines are important online information intermediaries that are frequently used and highly trusted by the public despite multiple evidence of their outputs being subjected to inaccuracies and biases. One form of such inaccuracy, which so far received little scholarly attention, is the presence of conspiratorial information, namely pages promoting conspiracy theories. We address this gap by conducting a comparative algorithm audit to examine the distribution of conspiratorial information in search results across five search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex. Using a virtual agent-based infrastructure, we systematically collect search outputs for six conspiracy theory-related queries (flat earth, new world order, qanon, 9/11, illuminati, george soros) across three locations (two in the US and one in the UK) and two observation periods (March and May 2021). We find that all search engines except Google consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results, although the share of such content varied across queries. Most conspiracy-promoting results came from social media and conspiracy-dedicated websites while conspiracy-debunking information was shared by scientific websites and, to a lesser extent, legacy media. The fact that these observations are consistent across different locations and time periods highlight the possibility of some search engines systematically prioritizing conspiracy-promoting content and, thus, amplifying their distribution in the online environments.