Technology in Politics: How search engines engineer polarisation
Political polarisation is a global pandemic. Historically only considered a major issue in the United States, with the aid of search engines and the newfound ease of accessing political information online, it is becoming more common around the world to find a chasm between political parties and a greater division in public opinion. Technology has been praised as a saviour of democracy in a modern age but questions around the political neutrality of search engines raise concerns - is technology as virtuous as we might believe or rather a devil in disguise?
Search engines are inherently bias. They are built by human beings with prejudices and opinions. This brings into question the very nature of how a search engine functions. In simple terms, a search engine systematically traverses the World Wide Web for information relating to a user’s query using keywords. The issue of whether these systems have bias arises with the results they have been programmed to display to the user. The phenomenon labelled ‘search engine bias’ describes how search engines control user perception – they dictate the associations made with the content we look up. When analysing polarisation on a societal level, search engines operating in this way can lead to widespread beliefs about a subject that could be harmful or incorrect. For example, the ‘Algorithm of Oppression’ discusses how ‘searching for information about Jewish people or history often leads to anti-Semitic websites’. This is dangerous because studies show that web users are more likely to trust information from an online search than from social media.
The way in which a user phrases their query in the search engine also has significant impact on the information they receive as this can change the keywords used to select relevant results. This means that a search engine can effectively mirror a user’s personal bias, which creates a warped view of the content they are requesting and can ultimately reinforce their prejudiced views by showing information that is not accurate. In this way, search engines can enhance political polarisation in presenting results with ‘extreme’ content.
The ease of access of search engines increases polarisation. Political parties thrive by maximising user engagement online. Search engines do not use the same popularity-based algorithms that social media sites employ, but advertisements generated on search engine webpages can be politically targeted at users or shown in order of popularity to make users more likely to click on them. The use of advertisements is how most search engines generate revenue and the process of displaying ads is questionably non-partisan. In the 2016 Presidential Election, evidence was found that the Russian government had been purchasing ads on Google - the goal of which remains uncertain, but indicated the possibility for foreign powers to try and affect elections by influencing Google search results. Perhaps the main force of engineering political polarisation is not through a biased search bar, but rather through the content displayed on a search engine’s webpage.
A key example is Google, as undoubtedly the most popular search engine in the world. Over the years, Google has been accused of favouring liberal news sites over conservative websites in the US. This is measured by how much ‘traffic’ (users clicking on a link) a website receives. Whilst Google CEO Sundar Pichai insists there is no bias, search engine optimisation (SEO) site Ahrefs’ conducted a study leading up to the 2020 US Presidential election to compare the amount of traffic liberal and conservative news sites, such as Vox and the New York Post, were receiving each time Google updated their search algorithms. The results were not significant, but there was an increase in traffic received by conservative sites. This could mean one of two things: either users were more likely to be shown conservative political opinions by the search engine or more users were looking up questions that were pro-conservative and Google merely reflected this result. It is a controversial debate and has resulted in several US Congressional hearings involving Big Tech Leaders due to concern held by both the Republican and Democrat parties.
Similar situations are arising in Europe. Populist and radical voices that once existed on the side-lines have now become mainstream largely due to an increase in promotion online. Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany are examples of some of the ‘extreme’ voices that are part of this populist movement. Search engines have given these groups platforms to campaign with increased access to share information with the public. People can conduct more research to form their political opinion than ever before, but technological advances have resulted in extreme polarisation as people are able to freely discover more about what they believe in and want to support.
The contribution of search engines to political polarisation is detrimental because the extreme polarisation seen around the world has consequences that undermine democracy itself. These consequences have the potential to be violent, cause legislative dysfunction and lessen trust in political institutions that were fundamentally created to maintain order and ensure safety.
Discussing how technology has helped polarise politics is an extensive ethical and moral debate. Overall, there is no damning evidence for search engines displaying extensive bias, but from a philosophical point of view, search engine neutrality forces the world to question if we can ever escape bias or if it is engrained in every aspect of our lives. Do human beings project their bias onto all of their creations? A search engine has the potential to be the greatest political saviour or the biggest political weapon in the world and it could all depend on who decided to purchase an advertisement that day.
