Search Results Not Biased Along Party Lines: Study
They focused on Google searches only because of its dominant market share in web search. About 90 percent of all searches are through Google, the researchers noted.
Identifying Partisanship, Political Bias
To evaluate political bias in search results, the researchers focused on evaluating the news sources that appeared on the first page of a Google search result for the candidate. Social media platforms, personal campaign websites and encyclopedia entries were excluded as they could not meaningfully be labeled with a partisanship score, the researchers noted.
The researchers used a scoring method created by researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for their analysis of mainstream media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. In that work, the researchers assigned a partisan score to a source based on who shared their content over Twitter. They looked at some 44,000 users who they labeled as being likely conservative or liberal. Their political leanings were determined by their retweets of the two general election party candidates – Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Rarely did users retweet both candidates. From there, the researchers were able to evaluate partisanship.
Here, Metaxa and colleagues applied those scores to the sources that appeared in their Google search results.
Examining the distribution of partisanship in their data set, the researchers found that overall, candidates’ search results were comprised mostly of centrist news sources that were offset slightly by center-left news outlets. The researchers did identify two large peaks of highly partisan sources on the left and especially the right, but in general, they found no bias for either party. Distribution was roughly normal, with a prevalence of centrist sites, they report in the paper.
“This is good news from a trust point of view, but more audits along more dimensions are needed,” Hancock said.
How Incumbents and Challengers Compare
The researchers also wanted to know what search engine results for a candidate might reveal about how elections played out in the real world.
They looked at how search engine results for candidates compared with their incumbency status. Political scientists have shown that incumbents are more moderate and centrist in their positions than challengers. Here, the researchers wanted to know whether search media would reflect that trend.
The researchers found that it did. Search inquiries for incumbent candidates resulted in a “strikingly” lower level of partisanship compared to challengers.
The researchers were also curious to know how that then compared to election outcome.
The researchers found that election winners and losers have very different search results – but these results might be attributed to a candidates’ incumbency status. Metaxa pointed out that political science has shown that a main effect driving election outcome is incumbency status; incumbents are overwhelmingly likely to win. The researchers’ data, consistent with political science theory, showed that incumbent candidates’ search results were more moderate and mainstream, compared with challengers.
Metaxa believes that with more work, there is a possibility for using search to gain real-time insight into elections, like a digital polling mechanism.
