Auditing Google's Search Headlines as a Potential Gateway to Misleading Content: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Election
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ARTICLE SUMMARY
An audit of Google search results shows that videos promoted more election-related misinformation than news stories or ads. Users’ choice of search terms affected the quality of information displayed.
POLICY RELEVANCE
Audits of search results can help search engines limit the spread of misinformation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, online misinformation perpetuated a false belief in election fraud; nearly 65% of Republican voters believed the election results were illegitimate.
- An audit of 800,000 headlines produced by Google’s search engine in response to searches for election-related keywords shows that videos are the most problematic form of election disinformation, compared to news stories and ads.
- Researchers examined whether the location of the users affected search results.
- Voters in swing states saw more campaign ads, but the search results did not differ in quality.
- Google did not create information bubbles catering to regional bias.
- Users’ choice of search terms affected the quality of the results; using conspiracy-related search keywords like “voter fraud” (rather than a neutral term like “ballots”) resulted in display of more misinformation.
- Legacy news sites such as The Washington Post and Fox News promoted most of the total headlines promoting doubt, but partisan sites like riggedthefilm.com promoted the highest percentage of misinformation.
- Most ads did not seem harmful to perceptions of election integrity.
- Affixing simple headlines to content can help auditors identify problematic videos, so search engines can ensure that misinformation is not displayed prominently; search engines should not attempt to censor political content.
- To help design future audits, search engines should be required by law to provide researchers with access to anonymized data.
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About Kate Starbird
Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE). She is Co-founder and Director of the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) and the Director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation (emCOMP) Laboratory, both at UW. She is also adjunct faculty in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Information School, and a data science fellow at the eScience Institute.
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About M. Ryan Calo
Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He is a founding co-director (with Batya Friedman and Tadayoshi Kohno) of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and the UW Center for an Informed Public (with Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird, and Jevin West). Professor Calo holds adjunct appointments at the University of Washington Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
