Googling in Russian Abroad: How Kremlin-Affiliated Websites Contribute to the Visibility of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories in Search Results
Journal: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Year: 2023

Research that audited search algorithms typically deployed queries in one language fielded from within only one country. In contrast, this study scrutinized 8,800 Google results retrieved in November 2020 from 5 countries (Russia, the United States, Germany, Ukraine, and Belarus) in response to queries on COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Russian and English. We found that the pandemic appeared similar to people who googled in Russian independent of their geolocation. The only exception was Ukrain