JERAA 2025

Facts and Fabrication in Search Experience: Russia’s War on Ukraine and Google's Role in Gatekeeping Fact-Checked Information

Kateryna Kasianenko, Ashwin Nagappa, Silvia Montaña-Niño, Michelle Riedlinger, Ned Watt, Anand Badola, Axel Bruns, and Daniel Angus

• 2 Dec. 2025 – Paper presented at the JERAA 2025 conference, Brisbane

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine was met with heightened attention from news media and publics around the world, which also resulted in a proliferation of false claims (Kasianenko, 2024). In response, diverse actors have deployed a range of counter-strategies (Glazunova et al., 2023; Kasianenko & Boichak, 2025; Morais et al., 2025). Among these, the role of fact-checking remains understudied (Dierickx & Lindén, 2024). While the field of fact-checking is far from uniform (Montana-Nino et al., 2024), many fact-checkers operate under resource and time constraints (Dierickx & Lindén, 2024), an issue which is being addressed through cooperation with digital platforms (Watt et al., 2025) and digital tools (Spina et al., 2023). An example of such cooperation was Google’s incorporation of Claim Review, a tagging system fact-checkers could utilise to mark verified materials in the search results presented to users. In June 2025, Google announced it would scrap the system, which had been in operation for ten years (Dudfield, 2025). This is a concerning development as previous studies found that Google search returned a significant share of false claims in response to queries associated with common Russian misinformation narratives (Kuznetsova et al., 2024).

In this paper, we empirically examine how, following Google’s 2025 decision, fact-checked claims are presented to users searching for topics related to Russia’s war on Ukraine. As previous research has shown (Bruns, 2022; Meese et al., 2024), while search engines themselves may not produce personalised search results, differences in how users formulate their search queries depending on their beliefs, values, and more, may result in variation in search results. To understand the connection between search practices and exposure to fact-checked information, we curate a list of queries related to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Using discourse modelling with LLMs, we tailor queries to various personas of searchers and examine respective search results through a mixed-methods approach. We focus especially on the presence or absence of fact-checks and fact-checked sources in the search results. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the role of search engines as gatekeepers of fact-checking and digital information integrity in times of war and crisis.