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

TL;DR

This study investigates how Google and Yandex search engines rank Russian state-controlled media, revealing their roles in propagating Kremlin propaganda amid the Ukraine conflict.

Contribution

It provides the first comparative analysis of Google and Yandex in promoting Russian state-affiliated news sources during a major geopolitical event.

Findings

Google and Yandex both favor Russian state media in search rankings.

Yandex shows a higher propensity to promote Kremlin propaganda.

Search algorithms significantly influence information dissemination in Russian cyberspace.

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.