The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex in January 2024, from locations around the world; it ran a range of queries on various topics, in a range of languages, and framed these both neutrally and in a version that picked up on the themes of Russian propaganda tropes.
This produced a dataset of some 250,000 URLs from 30,000 search results, representing over 7,000 unique domains. Some 2,000 of these were annotated by humans; this was then extended via LLMs, and validated against the human-coded data.
Overall, propaganda-aligned queries produced somewhat more results that supported the propaganda; for Yandex, in particular, this proportion was high, but Google too returned a considerable proportion of propaganda-supporting results. Such patterns concentrated especially on queries relating to western values and geopolitics, but not on topics relating to military and war or LGBTIQ+ communities.
So, propaganda-related queries produce more propaganda-related results, especially on Yandex and Google. Region and language of the query (other than Russian) made no difference, however, which is somewhat surprising. Further research needs to explore the algorithmic processes by which such propaganda sources end up in these query results.
