5 ms·

Can you give some examples of politically sensitive content that is manipulated or censored on western search engines compared to Russian?

• kypro 4y ago
  Something I used Yandex for was research during the pandemic. Not sure if it's the same today but at one point it was humorously hard to find anything that suggested the COVID-19 vaccines were anything but 100% safe and effective on Google. This is especially true if it's video content because video sites which host vaccine sceptical content are heavily down ranked by Google - sites like Bitchute and Odysee. And obviously YouTube which ranks well in Google wasn't allowing that content at all - not sure if that's still the same today. On politically sensitive content here's an example I've shown before of how a search for "Trump" might differ between Google and Yandex, https://imgur.com/oPXP0wh https://imgur.com/oPXP0wh If searching for controversial figures or organisations you'll find Google tends to return news articles from left-wing media outlets where as Yandex tends to just return links associated to the individual / organisation. You can see this difference for yourself if you search for individuals like "Alex Jones". Other notable examples would be extremely controversial content that Google / YouTube hides from results or removes completely. So for example if you want to find various alt-right / extremist content you basically need to use Yandex at this point. I'd rather not share specific examples of this, but as someone who's interested in online extremism if you want to view source materials you'll quickly find you need to use alternative search engines like Yandex to find this. There are also examples I'd consider extremist-adjacent like discussions around race and IQ or immigration policy which tends to be fairly one sided in Google. You will find some diversity of opinion but because Google downranks a lot of the more controversial sites the conversation is certainly biased towards what's political acceptable. I'm not necessarily criticising Google for this by the way, I'm just saying it's something that Google does and you should be aware of if you're ever searching for things considered politically incorrect. I'm also aware of examples where Google searches tend to be more "diversified". This isn't something I've noticed or am that concerned with personally, but I'm aware of people who feel Google biases search results for things like "white families" to show more interracial families while Yandex doesn't. And I think there are examples where you can search for things like "famous scientists" and get more women scientists in the results than you might expect. From what I've seen I think this can be explained in good faith and isn't necessarily evidence of Google tampering with the results, but I've seen people (mostly in alt-right circles) share cherry-picked examples (in my opinion anyway) of stuff like this.
• tomByrer 4y ago
  Do any search for any US political content on Google. I (in Kansas City) get almost all Left-leaning to hard Left news sites as the first 10 results, while pre-Trump results I'd almost always get 2-3 lean/far-Right results in top 10. Compare vs AllSides https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
  • xenospn 4y ago
    is it possible that yandex is manipulated and it just fits your world view better?