Search engines play a central role in routing political information to citizens. The algorithmic personalization of search results by large search engines like Google implies that different users may be offered systematically different information. However, measuring the causal effect of user characteristics and behavior on search results in a politically relevant context is challenging. We set up a population of 150 synthetic internet users ("bots") who are randomly located across 25 US cities and are active for several months during the 2020 US Elections and their aftermath. These users differ in their browsing preferences and political ideology, and they build up realistic browsing and search histories. We run daily experiments in which all users enter the same election-related queries. Search results to these queries differ substantially across users. Google prioritizes previously visited websites and local news sites. Yet, it does not generally prioritize websites featuring the user's ideology.
翻译：搜索引擎在引导公民获得政治信息方面发挥着核心作用。谷歌等大型搜索引擎搜索结果的算法化个人化意味着不同用户可能得到系统化的不同信息。然而,衡量用户特点和行为对政治相关背景的搜索结果的因果关系具有挑战性。我们建立了150个合成互联网用户(“机器人”),他们随机分布在美国25个城市,在2020年美国大选及其之后的几个月里活跃。这些用户在浏览偏好和政治意识形态方面各不相同,他们积累了现实化的浏览和搜索历史。我们每天进行实验,让所有用户都进入同样的与选举有关的查询。对这些查询的搜索结果在用户之间有很大差异。谷歌将以前访问过的网站和当地新闻网站列为优先事项。然而,这些网站通常并不以用户的意识形态为主。
相关内容
微信扫码咨询专知VIP会员