Himansuh, Zade, Wack, Morgan, Zhang, Yuanrui, Starbird, Kate, Calo, Ryan and Jevin West. “Auditing Google’s Search Headlines as a Potential Gateway to Misleading Content: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Election.” Journal of Online Trust and Safety, 1, 4, 2022. https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i4.72
Using more than 800k headlines from Google’s search engine results pages (SERP), we present results from a qualitative coding effort of 5,600 headlines. We show how delegitimizing content was most common among video results while also detailing which search terms and domains were most influential in the dissemination of delegitimizing headlines. We conclude with policy recommendations related to data transparency.