Algorithmically Curated Lies: How Search Engines Handle Misinformation about US Biolabs in Ukraine

The growing volume of online content prompts the need for adopting algorithmic systems of information curation. These systems range from web search engines to recommender systems and are integral for helping users stay informed about important societal developments. However, unlike journalistic editing the algorithmic information curation systems (AICSs) are known to be subject to different forms of malperformance which make them vulnerable to possible manipulation. The risk of manipulation is particularly prominent in the case when AICSs have to deal with information about false claims that underpin propaganda campaigns of authoritarian regimes. Using as a case study of the Russian disinformation campaign concerning the US biolabs in Ukraine, we investigate how one of the most commonly used forms of AICSs - i.e. web search engines - curate misinformation-related content. For this aim, we conduct virtual agent-based algorithm audits of Google, Bing, and Yandex search outputs in June 2022. Our findings highlight the troubling performance of search engines. Even though some search engines, like Google, were less likely to return misinformation results, across all languages and locations, the three search engines still mentioned or promoted a considerable share of false content (33% on Google; 44% on Bing, and 70% on Yandex). We also find significant disparities in misinformation exposure based on the language of search, with all search engines presenting a higher number of false stories in Russian. Location matters as well with users from Germany being more likely to be exposed to search results promoting false information. These observations stress the possibility of AICSs being vulnerable to manipulation, in particular in the case of the unfolding propaganda campaigns, and underline the importance of monitoring performance of these systems to prevent it.

In Generative AI we Trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information?

This article presents a comparative analysis of the ability of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots, ChatGPT and Bing Chat, recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot, to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ+ related debates. We compare how the chatbots perform in high- and low-resource languages by using prompts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Furthermore, we explore the ability of chatbots to evaluate statements according to political communication concepts of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theory, using definition-oriented prompts. We also systematically test how such evaluations are influenced by source bias which we model by attributing specific claims to various political and social actors. The results show high performance of ChatGPT for the baseline veracity evaluation task, with 72 percent of the cases evaluated correctly on average across languages without pre-training. Bing Chat performed worse with a 67 percent accuracy. We observe significant disparities in how chatbots evaluate prompts in high- and low-resource languages and how they adapt their evaluations to political communication concepts with ChatGPT providing more nuanced outputs than Bing Chat. Finally, we find that for some veracity detection-related tasks, the performance of chatbots varied depending on the topic of the statement or the source to which it is attributed. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based chatbots in tackling different forms of false information in online environments, but also points to the substantial variation in terms of how such potential is realized due to specific factors, such as language of the prompt or the topic.