Google searches favor reality over conspiracy theories, while Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex do not.
Fortunately for reality, Google has a 91.4% market share, Bing 3.14%, Yahoo 1.53%, Yandex 0.94%, and DuckDuckGo 0.66%. (The study did not consider the Baidu search engine with a 1.76% market share.)
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.
From here paper by Aleksandra Urmana, Mykola Makhortykhb, Roberto Ulloac, and Juhi Kulshrestha.
...(“flat earth”, “new world order”, “qanon”, “9/11”, “illuminati”, “george soros”)...
ReplyDeleteAll of these are either right-wing conspiracy theories, or more or less neutral. I count 4 as right-wing, 2 as neutral. None are distinctly left-wing conspiracies. So the test tells us that Google discounts right-wing conspiracy theories, but tells us nothing about how it treats left-wing conspiracy theories. Too bad. Would have been more interesting if it had been better-balanced.
This is because the right-wing at this moment in time is dominated by conspiracy theories and the left-wing is not. As a June 2020 academic journal article explained:
ReplyDelete"It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left-right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general.
Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges' g = .77, SE = .07, p < .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12681
I looked at the study you noted. It appears to be specifically designed to find conspiratorial thinking among the right, by choosing to focus on global warming, a known issue that the left and right tend to have differences of opinion on. Suppose instead they had chosen 'Trump colluded with the Russians' and tested to see who agreed more with that?
ReplyDeleteObviously it would take months to read or even skim their references, so I picked one on a subject I know something about, COVID. That paper makes 2 claims about conservatives' conspiratorial thinking, that conservatives were more likely to believe the virus was made in a lab, and were more likely to believe a vaccine would be available 'in a few months', both of which they identify as stupid beliefs mainly held by conservatives.
Obviously, multiple vaccines were available within 6 months of this article being published. Also, while it will never be proven, it now appears at least fairly likely that the virus was indeed made in a lab, and probably released accidentally. Their 'conservatives are stupid conspiracists' meme falls pretty flat. Are the rest of the references as bad as this one is?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/how-rightleaning-media-coverage-of-covid19-facilitated-the-spread-of-misinformation-in-the-early-stages-of-the-pandemic-in-the-us/6B0EB93F6BA17608D82B4D23EDA75E50
...We find that both people who solely (row 2 in Figure 3) or sometimes (row 3) consume right-leaning media were significantly more likely to believe that COVID was purposefully made in a lab, and that a COVID vaccine exists now (or will exist soon). However, we find no evidence that right-leaning news consumption was significantly associated with believing that COVID was accidentally lab-made. According to our models, while just 17 per ceny of people who primarily consume left-leaning media believed that COVID was purposefully lab-made, nearly double that number (34%) of exclusive right-leaning news consumers believed the same. Similarly, while 17 per cent of left-leaning news consumers believed that a COVID-19 vaccine already (or will soon) exist, more than double (35%) believed this claim among right-wing news consumers...
There is a big difference between "derived from a lab" and "purposefully made in a lab" (presumably as a bioweapon and perhaps purposefully released as well).
ReplyDeleteFactually, an accidental escape from a high level bio-research lab in Wuhan of a virus that was being studied by infectious disease researchers who were not intending to make a bioweapon and certainly didn't intentionally release it, is indeed a plausible possibility.
But, conspiracy thinkers deny the accuracy of Hanlon's razor "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," which goes back at least to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) (as translated from German): "Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do. At least the latter two are certainly rarer." (It is probably snappier in German, as Goethe was a masterful writer by all accounts and that is horribly clunky).
Reflexively giving the story the twist of ill intentions is classic conspiratorial style thinking, whether or not it is true (as on rare occasions it will be, like a broken clock that is right twice a day).
It is a close cousin of the (often openly stated in religious thinking) view that "nothing happens by accident", contrary to reality where random coincidences happen on a regular basis every day. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24544066 The likelihood of any given coincidence is absurdly low, but the likelihood of some coincidence is very high, mostly due to the "look elsewhere effect." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect