When the internet keeps Russians in the dark – BBC News BBC Homepage

The Kremlin maintains a stranglehold on the country’s media, especially television, which glorifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a liberation mission and casts false reports on atrocities.

In Russia, the Internet has long been the main space for alternative sources of information. But since the outbreak of war in February, the Kremlin has launched a crackdown on independent online media.

Digital rights watchdog Roskomsvoboda estimates that – in the first six months of the conflict – nearly 7,000 websites were blocked in Russia, including those of mainstream independent media and human rights groups. man.

BBC Monitoring wanted to know what Russians see when they search the internet.

We used a virtual private network (VPN), to make it look like we were searching the web from Russia.

Between June and October, we conducted dozens of searches on major Russian search engines – Yandex and Google – for keywords relating to the war in Ukraine.

Yandex is one of the big stars of the Russian tech scene. It manages the largest search engine in the country and wants to be independent vis-à-vis the authorities.

According to company statistics, it handles around 60% of web searches in Russia, compared to 35% for Google.

From the start of the war, Yandex was criticized for the pro-Kremlin orientation of sites and articles featured on its news aggregator, Yandex News. In September, he sold Yandex News to the owner of the Kremlin-linked social network VK.

But Yandex retains control of its general search engine, and here the results of the BBC Monitoring experiment reveal an alternate reality dominated by Russian war propaganda.

One of the wanted subjects was Bucha, the Ukrainian town where hundreds of civilians were killed by Russian troops before their withdrawal in early April.

This killing shocked the whole world. But in Russia, many seem to believe state media claiming it was staged by Ukraine.

When we searched for Bucha on Yandex – using a VPN, as if we were based in Russia and typing in Russian – the first page of results looked like the murders never happened.

Three of the top nine results were anonymous blog posts denying the involvement of Russian troops. The other six contained no independent report of the events.

The discovery of mass burial sites in October in the town of Lyman, after it was recaptured from Russian forces, was also mentioned on Yandex, in the spirit of pro-Kremlin patronage. Several pro-Kremlin dispatches blaming the deaths on Ukrainian “Nazis” were in the top 10 results.

Searching for the word “Ukraine” on the search engine, similarly, also returned results to pro-Kremlin content.

Four of the nine front-page results were linked to pro-Kremlin news outlets, and none to independent media.

Independent reporting only occasionally appeared in Yandex search results, with links to Wikipedia or YouTube articles.

Asked by the BBC, Yandex said its search in Russia “displays content [qui est] available on the Internet, excluding sites that are blocked by the regulator [des médias]The company denied any “human interference” in the ranking of the results.

What happens if you switch from Yandex to Google, Russia’s second-largest search engine?

Searching the US company’s search engine with our VPN set to a Russian location, and typing in Russian, we still found pro-Kremlin media, but mixed in with a few independent and Western sources.

Even more independent sources came up when we searched Google with the VPN set as if we were in the UK, but still typing in Russian. There were a lot of results covering either civilian deaths or war.

Google told the BBC that its search “reflects content available on the open web” and that its algorithm is trained to “highlight high-quality information from trusted sources”.

So why are Yandex’s search results so different from Google’s?

Several specialists interviewed by the BBC said it was unlikely that large-scale manipulation would take place inside Yandex, as it would be too complicated to do.

One possibility is that the company’s results are simply skewed by the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent reporting on the invasion.

With thousands of websites blocked by Russia’s media regulator, swathes of information don’t show up in Yandex’s search results.

“They [les autorités] can completely clean up the results,” Alexei Sokirko, a former Yandex developer, told the BBC.

At the same time, the Kremlin spends a lot to ensure that web content reflects its own worldview, he added.

Research experts Guido Ampollini and Mykhailo Orlov of marketing firm GA Agency say it could also skew the results users see on Yandex, as the search engine’s algorithm could reward pro-Kremlin material with a rank higher and downgrade alternative opinions.

Could using a VPN help Russians learn about the war in their own language?

If they use Yandex to find this information, not necessarily.

When searching his engine with the VPN set to UK and using Russian, a bizarre independent source came up, but pro-Kremlin sources still dominated.

According to Messrs. Ampollini and Orlov, the pro-Kremlin content seems to have been carefully tailored for the algorithm to rank it better.

As for an obscure news site that featured prominently in the results, they also found signs of possible web traffic manipulation.

A large number of potentially artificial links to the site were found from external websites – a common technique for improving a site’s search ranking.

Finally, Yandex may reflect the fact that Russian users themselves choose pro-Kremlin content.

Research specialist Nick Boyle, of digital marketing agency The Audit Lab, told the BBC that – unlike Google – Yandex takes user behavior into account.

This means, for example, that a website’s ranking in searches can be affected by the number of visits it receives. Google claims this is not the case for its search engine.

The GA agency team thought it was possible that many Russians clicked on content that portrayed their military in a positive light, prompting Yandex’s algorithm to reward them with a higher ranking.

Lev Gershenzon believes that however the Kremlin has managed to dominate Yandex’s search results, it means that anyone who wants to question what they hear in state media will only get information confirming the official point of view.

“You open the main page of Yandex and you start [rechercher l’attaque] from Kremenchuk to receive an alternative image from other sources, and all you get…is everything,” he told the BBC, adding: “It’s like a double punch .”