In much of the world, internet searches open the door to a wider world of information, but in Russia, they are part of a system that helps trap people in an alternate reality.
Shortly after 10 people were killed in a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk in June, Lev Gershenzon, a former manager of Russian technology company Yandex, typed the name of the city into his search engine to get more information.
The results he obtained shocked him.
“ The sources that appeared at the top of the page were strange and obscure,” he told the BBC. “There was a blog by an unknown author who claimed that the information about the deaths was false.”
The Kremlin maintains strict control over the The country’s media outlets, especially television, which glorify the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a liberation mission and dismiss reports of atrocities as false.
For a long time, the Internet in Russia has been the main space for alternative sources of information. However, since the war began in February, the Kremlin has launched a major offensive against independent digital media.
The watchdog of digital rights Roskomsvoboda estimates that, in the first six months of the conflict, almost 7 were blocked.10 websites in Russia, including those of leading independent media and human rights groups.
Our experiment
The BBC Monitoring Unit wanted to know what people in Russia see when they search the web now.
We use a virtual private network (VPN) to make it look like we were searching the internet from Russia.
Between June and October, we conducted dozens of searches on Russia’s main search engines, Yandex and Google, for keywords related to the war in Ukraine.
Yandex is one of the g big stars of the local Russian tech scene. It operates the largest search engine in the country and presents itself as independent from the authorities.
According to the company’s own statistics, it manages around 77% of web searches performed in Russia, while Google is responsible for about 60%.
Since the beginning of the war, Yandex has been criticized for the pro-Kremlin bias of the sites and stories that appear on its news aggregator, Yandex News. In September, the company sold Yandex News to the owner of the Kremlin-linked social network VK.
But Yandex maintains control of its search engine and, here, the results of the BBC Monitoring experiment reveal an alternate reality dominated by Russian war propaganda.
Not mentioned to atrocities
One of the topics searched for was Bucha, the Ukrainian city where Russian troops killed hundreds of civilians before they withdrew in early April.
The deaths shocked the world but, in Russia, many seem to believe the official media narrative , which they claim were staged by Ukraine.
Yandex’s Russian results on the killings of civilians in Bucha (left) included blog posts denying that Russia is to blame, while results from Google in the United Kingdom gone talk about there being evidence that proves the atrocities.
When we look for “Bucha” on Yandex, using a VPN as if we were in Russia and typing in Russian, the results that came first, at the top of the page, made it seem like the murders never took place.
Three of the nine main results were anonymous blogs denying the involvement of Russian troops. The remaining six did not contain independent information about the events.
The discovery of mass graves in October in the city of Lyman, after it was retaken by Ukrainian forces, was also reflected in Yandex from a point of view pro-Kremlin view. Various pro-Kremlin news stories blaming the deaths on Ukrainian “Nazis” were among those first results.
A typical pro-Kremlin blog very prominent in Yandex searches that denies that the Russian military killed civilians in Bucha.
Searching for “Ukraine” also produced highly biased towards the Kremlin narrative.
Four of the nine front page results were linked to pro-Kremlin media outlets , and none to independent media.
Independent reports were only occasionally glimpsed in Yandex search results with links to Wikipedia or YouTube articles.
Asked by the BBC, Yandex assured that its search in Russia “shows content [that is] available on the internet, excluding sites that are blocked for or the [media] regulator.” He denied that there was any “human interference” in the ranking results.
Yandex results in Russia (left) and Google in the UK (right) covered the mass burials in Lyman but, in Yandex, reports described the exhumation of the bodies as “desecration”.
So what happens if you switch from Yandex to the second largest search engine in Russia, Google?
US search engine with our VPN set to a Russian location and written in Russian still returned pro-Kremlin media, but mixed in with some independent and Western sources.
When we googled in Russian, but with the VPN set to UK, even more independent sources came up. Among the results, many reported civilian or war deaths.
According to Google told the BBC, its search “reflects the content that is available on the open web”, and its algorithm is trained to “prominently display high-quality information from reliable sources”.
Cleaning up the results
So why do Yandex results differ so much from Google?
Several specialists the BBC spoke to felt that large-scale manipulation from inside Yandex is unlikely to be taking place, as it would be too complicated.
One possibility is that the company’s results are simply skewed by the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent reporting on the invasion.
As thousands of websites have been blocked by Russia’s media regulator, largeamounts of information do not appear in the Yandex results.
“[The authorities] can clean up the results completely,” Alexei Sokirko, a former Yandex programmer, told the BBC.
At the same time, the Kremlin is investing heavily in making sure that the web content it creates reflects its own vision of the world, he added.
Search experts Guido Ampollini and Myjailo Orlov, from marketing firm GA Agency, say this could also skew the results users see on Yandex, as the search engine algorithm may reward pro-Kremlin material with higher rankings, while penalizing alternative information.
Artificial web traffic
Could a VPN help Russians learn more about the war in their own language?
If they are using Yandex to find that information, not necessarily.
When searching on their engine with the UK-based VPN and writing in Russian, some independent sources appeared, but pro-Kremlin sources were still predominant.
Ampollini and Orlov say pro-Kremlin content is carefully screened Designed to be ranked higher by the algorithm.
One One of the featured results was a little-known news site, where experts found signs of possible web traffic manipulation.
Specifically, a large number of potentially artificial links to the site were found from other pages, a common technique to improve the search ranking of a website.
Finally, it is possible that Yandex is reflecting the fact that Russian users themselves choose pro-Kremlin content.
Search specialist Nick Boyle, from digital marketing agency The Audit Lab, explained to the BBC that, unlike Google,Yandex takes user behavior into account.
This means, for example, that the search ranking of a website can be affected by the number of visits it receives. Google claims that this is not the case with its search engine.
The GA Agency team believes that many Russians may be clicking on content that portrays their army in a positive light, which which causes the Yandex algorithm to reward you with higher rankings.
Lev Gershenzon believes that regardless of how you achieved the Kremlin’s dominance over Yandex search results, the consequence is that anyone who wants to question what they hear in the state media will only get information that confirms the official opinion.
“You open the Yandex front page and start [searching for] Kremenchuk’s attack to receive a different image from other sources and all you get is ‘yes, you’re right, it’s fake’ . That’s where it all ends,” he explained to the BBC: “it’s like a double whammy.”
Remember that
you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe! 127606296