The Kremlin-Controlled Search Engine Yandex as a Tool of Foreign Propaganda

www.ssoar.info The Kremlin-Controlled Search Engine Yandex as a Tool of Foreign Propaganda Kravets, Daria; Beseler, Arista; Toepfl, Florian; Ryzhova, Anna Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Kravets, D., Beseler, A., Toepfl, F., & Ryzhova, A. (2024). The Kremlin-Controlled Search Engine Yandex as a Tool of Foreign Propaganda. Russian Analytical Digest, 313, 11-15. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000673162 Nutzungsbedingungen: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY-NC-ND Lizenz (Namensnennung-Nicht-kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung) zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.de Terms of use: This document is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND Licence (Attribution-Non Comercial-NoDerivatives). For more Information see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Diese Version ist zitierbar unter / This version is citable under: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-101375-9 RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST No. 313, 21 May 2024 11 The Kremlin-Controlled Search Engine Yandex as a Tool of Foreign Propaganda Daria Kravets, Arista Beseler, Florian Toepfl, and Anna Ryzhova (University of Passau) DOI: 10.3929/ethz-b-000673162 Abstract In February 2024, after lengthy negotiations and extensive political and legal pressure, the Russian search and technology company Yandex announced the sale of its business in Russia, including its search engine, to an investment fund consisting of investors with close ties to the Kremlin. In recent years, despite Yandex’s continued claims of political neutrality, journalists and academics alike have repeatedly demonstrated how Yandex’s algorithms are biased and censored in favor of the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. This analysis summarizes our new study under the RUSINFORM project at the University of Passau, in which we examined Yandex’s role as a tool of Kremlin propaganda abroad through the case of COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Belarus. We argue that our findings can be extrapolated to a broad range of political and cultural messages that touch upon the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests, as well as to other countries where Yandex is a popular search engine. Yandex as a Tool of Foreign Propaganda When the Russian military withdrew from the Ukrainian city of Bucha on March 31, 2022, the world learned about the atrocities committed by Russia’s troops against Ukrainian civilians during the occupation. In the following days, numerous Western media outlets published images of dead bodies strewn across the streets of Bucha, some with their hands bound, along with images of mass graves where nearly 300 people were discovered buried. Bucha quickly became a symbol of the war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, in early April 2022, searching for images of “Bucha” on Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, produced—in stark contrast to Google—no results related to the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians. Instead, it exclusively presented images portraying Bucha as a picturesque tourist destination (see Figure1 overleaf). This lack of political neutrality in Yandex’s coverage of the invasion triggered public outrage (see, for example, the March 1, 2022, Facebook post of Yandex’s former head of news, Lev Gershenzon). Many of Yandex’s employees resigned in protest, accusing the company of serving as a tool of Kremlin propaganda and actively concealing information about the war. The strategic relevance of shaping foreign agendas and influencing global audiences had become apparent to Russia’s ruling elites two decades before, in the wake of the so-called “Color Revolutions.” These transformative uprisings, which occurred in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan in 2004-2005, were primarily triggered by disputed elections; they aimed to topple the fraudulently elected presidents or governments, establish Western-style liberal democracies, and eliminate corruption. The Color Revolutions, perceived by Russia’s ruling elites as reflecting their failure to effectively manage public opinion in countries within Russia’s “traditional sphere of influence,” triggered a strategic reassessment of Russia’s international information strategies by its ruling elites. In the years that followed, the Kremlin devoted considerable resources to foreign propaganda initiatives, laying the groundwork for the extensive foreign communication apparatus that Russia operates today. In recent years, Russia has deployed diverse propaganda tools to influence foreign publics, ranging from the operation of state-sponsored international news broadcasters such as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik, to so-called “troll armies,” social networks (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki), Kremlin-funded cultural institutes and NGOs, and Kremlinbacked proxy media. However, the role of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex and its web search algorithms in facilitating Russia’s foreign-information influence has received limited scholarly attention so far. This is surprising given Yandex’s substantial search-market share in several countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, including Belarus (33%), Uzbekistan (23%), Tajikistan (22%), Kazakhstan (22%), Kyrgyzstan (13%), Ukraine (10%), and Turkmenistan (8%, StatCounter, 2024). While Google remains the most popular search engine in these countries, Yandex’s market share has continued to grow since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To address this gap, we at the RUSINFORM project at the University of Passau investigated how Yandex’s web search algorithms contribute to the dissemination of pro-Kremlin content in Belarus, one of the key target countries of Russia’s foreign-influence efforts (Kravets et al., 2023). To do so, we compared the visibility and narratives of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories in search results ANALYSIS RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST No. 313, 21 May 2024 12 to queries related to the origins of the COVID-19 virus that were retrieved by Yandex and its U.S.-based counterpart, Google, from within Belarus. It is important to highlight that the dissemination of conspiracy theories has long been one of the key strategies of Russia’s domes - tic and foreign propaganda. Research on RT, for instance, reveals that RT regularly deploys anti-Western conspiracy theories, among others, to draw attention to the socio-economic problems of the US, deflect criticism from Russia, and shift credibility away from the US and toward Russia in international affairs (Kragh and Asberg 2017; Watanabe 2018; Yablokov 2015). In the context of COVID-19, we regarded as conspiratorial any claims that one or more powerful actors secretly instigated the COVID-19 outbreak that were not accompanied by the presentation of credible evidence. Given how crucial search engines have become to finding news online, the presence of conspiracy theories among the top search results could lead people to start believing in these theories, sow confusion, or diminish people’s trust in established institutions. As Russia’s ruling elites have significant leverage over Yandex’s search algorithms, they essentially control what people see when they use Yandex to look up information on the internet. This means that for the Kremlin, Yandex is an effective tool for spreading its influence and narratives not only within Russia, but also abroad. Figure 1: Screenshots of Search Results of an Image Search for “Bucha” on Yandex and Google Source: Meduza 2022a. RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST No. 313, 21 May 2024 13 Gradual Political Appropriation of Yandex’s Algorithms Launched as an independent company by two school friends, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, in 1997, Yandex, short for “Yet Another iNDEX,” quickly rose to become the leading search engine in Russia, even surpassing Google. As of March 2024, Yandex was handling about 70 percent of all search queries in the country. While Yandex has been officially registered in the Netherlands since 2007—a strategy often utilized by Russian companies prior to the war to make them less vulnerable to regulatory changes and politicized law enforcement in Russia—its founders have consistently insisted that Yandex is, fundamentally, a Russian entity. Despite Yandex’s initial resistance, the political appropriation of its algorithms by Russia’s ruling elites has progressed over the years. Reportedly, Yandex began receiving regular visits from the Kremlin shortly after the 2008 war in Georgia. Already at that time, the authorities demanded that Yandex only display articles from Kremlin-approved sources in its search results. In 2009, then-President Dmitry Medvedev declared Yandex an asset of national importance. Subsequently, the “golden share” of Yandex, which gives its owner significant control over the company’s strategic decisions, was sold to the state-owned bank Sberbank. From then on, Yandex was subjected to intense legal and regulatory measures in Russia, which dictated which websites should be excluded from its search results and what information the company was required to share with the authorities. These regulatory measures culminated in the 2016 law “On News Aggregators,” which forced Yandex to remove from its news services all news websites not registered with Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state communications watchdog. In 2019, under renewed legal pressure from a new Russian law aimed at limiting foreign ownership of Russian internet companies, the “golden share” was transferred—following negotiations with the Kremlin—to a newly formed Public Interest Foundation created “to defend the interests of the Russian Federation” (Seddon 2019). Through the Foundation, which was composed largely of government representatives, the Russian government gained the authority to intervene in Yandex’s transactions and temporarily replace Yandex’s management if it deemed this to be in the national interest. As for indirect influence, it is generally believed that Yandex, preoccupied with its rivalry with Google, tended to avoid conflicts with Russia’s authorities in order to safeguard its economic interests (Google allegedly had more leeway not to comply, given its global financial independence from the Russian market). In return, the Russian authorities helped Yandex in its competition with Google. For example, following a complaint from Yandex, they initiated an antitrust lawsuit against Google for favoring its own services on the Android operating system, forcing Google in Russia to offer Android users the choice of a default search engine, including Yandex. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on Yandex co-founder and CEO Volozh for helping to promote pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian propaganda. However, Yandex’s services within the EU remained unaffected and widely accessible as of this writing in March 2024. While Yandex’s search engine has a relatively small market share within the EU, Yandex’s services go beyond search to include food delivery, email, taxi services, cloud computing, and autonomous driving. Notably, some of these services, such as Yango—a ride-hailing, delivery, and grocery service popular in Finland, Norway, and Romania—operate under different names in Western countries. Yango has been under investigation in the Netherlands since October 2023 due to concerns about the transfer of customer data to Russia’s intelligence services. Shortly after the invasion began, Yandex—under pressure from new laws penalizing the dissemination of “false information” about the Russian army, punishable by up to 15 years in prison—sold one of its core services behind search, the news service Yandex.News, as well as the infotainment service Yandex.Dzen to the state-controlled company VK, which owns a social network of the same name in Russia. These so-called “toxic assets” (Meduza, 2022b) had attracted significant scrutiny from the Russian authorities; by selling them, Yandex hoped to safeguard its other businesses, including search. Volozh resigned as Yandex’s CEO, left Russia, and in August 2023, a year and a half after the invasion, publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Volozh was subsequently removed from the EU sanctions list in March 2024). In February 2024, after lengthy negotiations and in the face of mounting political and legal pressure, including for outright nationalization, Yandex announced the sale of its business in Russia, including its search engine, to an investment fund consisting of investors with close ties to the Kremlin. These include former Gazprom executive Alexander Ryazanov and the top managers of Russian oil giant Lukoil. The majority of Yandex’s politically relevant services—such as search, e-mail, taxi, maps, food delivery, and the Large Language Model YandexGPT—will remain in Russia under the Kremlin’s control. They will be merged into a new company of the same name registered in the domestic “offshore” Kaliningrad. Volozh and the Dutch part of Yandex will retain some of its assets outside of Russia— consisting mostly of startups, including autonomous driving, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence— but will seek to rebrand their company by August 2024. RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST No. 313, 21 May 2024 14 The deal was sealed for $5.2 billion, about one-sixth of what Yandex’s shares were valued at before the invasion. Russia’s Informational Influence in Belarus: The Case of COVID-19 For our case study on Belarus, we collected the data, the results of which we summarize below, by scraping search results from the Belarusian versions of Google (google.by) and Yandex (yandex.by) over a one-month period (April 22—May 22, 2020) at the peak of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Belarus, using proxy servers located in Belarus. During this time frame, we collected the top 20 results every three days, for a total of 11 search rounds. In every round, we used three search terms with progressively greater specificity to conspiracy theories regarding the origins of COVID19: “coronavirus” (original query in Russian: коронавирус), “coronavirus origin” (коронавирус происхождение) and “coronavirus biological weapon” (коронавирус биологическое оружие). Although Belarus has two official languages, Russian and Belarusian, we conducted our queries only in Russian, as surveys indicate that the majority of Belarusians use Russian as their primary means of communication. By employing this approach, we acquired a dataset consisting of 1,320 search results (660 from Yandex and 660 from Google), among which 356 were unique, meaning they linked to different URLs. In the next step, a manual content analysis of each search result, we determined the geographic origin of the source website and its connections to Russia’s ruling elites; whether undebunked conspiracy theories were present; and who was suspected as the main plotter behind the outbreak of the pandemic. Main Findings of Our COVID-19 Case Study on Belarus Previous research has demonstrated that Yandex’s algorithms are manipulated in favor of the pro-Kremlin narratives of Russia’s ruling elites (see, for example, Daucé and Loveluck 2021; Makhortykh et al. 2022). However, these investigations focused primarily on how Yandex operates within Russia, not considering the possibility that Yandex could also play a role in spreading the political messages of Russia’s ruling elites beyond its borders. The findings from our Belarus case study reveal that Yandex’s web search algorithms show a similar bias toward Kremlin-connected websites and proKremlin narratives if accessed from abroad: in Belarus, Yandex similarly favors Kremlin-connected websites and pro-Kremlin narratives, suggesting that the search engine’s biases are not confined to Russia but extend internationally. Specifically, we found that (1) Yandex in Belarus was more likely to feature Kremlin-connected websites than Google; (2) Yandex was over twice as likely as Google to display undebunked conspiracy theories in its search results; (3) the majority of these conspiracy theories, across both search engines, originated from Russia-based websites or those connected to Russia’s ruling elites; and (4) conspiratorial content retrieved in searches on the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex close to exclusively suspected plotters from the US as being behind the outbreak of the pandemic, even though the virus was first observed in the Chinese province of Wuhan. Implications for Our Understanding of Russia’s Foreign Propaganda and the Role of Search Engines Against this backdrop, we argue that the search engine Yandex needs to be understood as one of the key tools of Russia’s foreign propaganda apparatus, fulfilling similar purposes to Russia’s prime foreign communication outlets, RT and Sputnik. Similarly to these entities, Yandex’s search engine is under the tight control of Russia’s ruling elites and contributes to increasing the visibility, among foreign audiences, of Kremlin-connected websites and pro-Kremlin content. For example, Yandex facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories that align with Russia’s geopolitical interests, contributing to the spread of an “us against them” mindset, with the US often portrayed as the antagonist. In this sense, we believe that the conclusions of our audit about how Yandex mediated one specific disinformation issue (COVID-19 conspiracy theories) can be extrapolated to a broad range of political (e.g., the war in Ukraine) and cultural messages (e.g., issues of Russian language abroad) that touch upon the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests. Moreover, in our view, they are also broadly generalizable to other countries neighboring Russia in which Yandex is widely used. In addition, our findings demonstrated the possibility of profound information inequalities between the users of Google and Yandex in Belarus. By favoring conspiracy theories and Kremlin-connected websites in its search results, Yandex created an information ecosystem for its users parallel to that of Google. For example, people who searched exclusively on Google or Yandex for information about the origin of the COVID-19 virus were likely to get a drastically different picture depending on which search engine they used. This is problematic, for example, in the context of Russia’s recent fullscale invasion of Ukraine, since our findings suggest that Belarusian users accessing information via Yandex might be informed only of Russian ruling elites’ perspective on the war, which is framed as a “special operation” to liberate the people of Donbas rather than a “war.” Since Yandex censors information about the war in Ukraine, news about civilian casualties among the Ukrainian population, Russia’s military losses, and crit- RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST No. 313, 21 May 2024 15 ical information about Russia’s actions will frequently not even reach Belarusians who rely on Yandex as a gateway to the Internet. Consequently, we suggest that policymakers who seek to reduce the Kremlin’s informational influence abroad, especially those in countries where Yandex and its various services are widely used, consider sanctioning technologies operated by Yandex. About the Authors Daria Kravets is a PhD Candidate in Political Communication at the University of Passau, Germany, and a researcher at the ERC Consolidator Project “The Consequences of the Internet for Russia’s Informational Influence Abroad” (RUSINFORM). Her research focuses on search engines as mediators of foreign influence, Russia’s informational influence abroad, and computational social science. Contact: [email protected] Florian Toepfl is a Professor at the University of Passau, where he holds the Chair of Political Communication with a Focus on Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Region. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project RUSINFORM. Arista Beseler is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the ERC Consolidator Project RUSINFORM (University of Passau). In her research, she focuses on German-language alternative media and their role as disseminators of pro-Kremlin content. Anna Ryzhova is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the ERC Consolidator Project RUSINFORM (University of Passau). The main focus of her research is Russian-speaking audiences in Germany and their practices of news use and news trust. Acknowledgments This article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 819025). It is part of the ERC consolidator project on “The Consequences of the Internet for Russia’s Informational Influence Abroad” (www.rusinform.uni-passau.de/en). Further Reading • Kravets, Daria, Anna Ryzhova, Florian Toepfl, and Arista Beseler. 2023. “Different Platforms, Different Plots? The Kremlin-Controlled Search Engine Yandex as a Resource for Russia’s Informational Influence in Belarus During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journalism 24 (12): 2762-2780. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231157845. • Daucé, Françoise, and Benjamin Loveluck. 2021. “Codes of Conduct for Algorithmic News Recommendation: The Yandex.News Controversy in Russia.” First Monday 26 (5). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i5.11708. • Gershenzon, Lev. 2022. Facebook post of March 1, 2022. https://www.facebook.com/lev.gershenzon/ posts/10222700169425290. • Makhortykh, Mykola, Aleksandra Urman, and Mariëlle Wijermars. 2022. “A Story of (Non)compliance, Bias, and Conspiracies: How Google and Yandex Represented Smart Voting during the 2021 Parliamentary Elections in Russia.” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review 3 (2). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-94. • Meduza. 2022a. “Chto vydaiut ‘Yandeks’ i Google po zaprosu ‘Bucha’? V odnoi kartinke.” Meduza, April 4, 2022. https://meduza.io/short/2022/04/04/chto-vydayut-yandeks-i-google-po-zaprosu-bucha-v-odnoy-kartinke. • Meduza. 2022b. “‘Toxic Assets’: How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Tore Yandex Apart.” Meduza, May 6, 2022. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/06/toxic-assets. • Kragh, Martin, and Sebastian Åsberg. 2017. “Russia’s Strategy for Influence through Public Diplomacy and Active Measures: The Swedish Case.” Journal of Strategic Studies 40, no. 6: 773–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390 .2016.1273830. • Seddon, Max. 2019. “Yandex Agrees Restructuring with Kremlin.” Financial Times, November 18, 2019. https:// www.ft.com/content/999e3ca6-09db-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84. • StatCounter. 2024. “Search engine market share.” StatCounter, March 23, 2024. https://gs.statcounter.com/ search-engine-market-share/all/ • Watanabe, Kohei. 2017. “The Spread of the Kremlin’s Narratives by a Western News Agency during the Ukraine Crisis.” The Journal of International Communication 23, no. 1: 138–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2017. 1287750. • Yablokov, Ilya. 2015. “Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT).” Politics 35, no. 3–4: 301–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12097.