The personalized recommendation feed Google Discover, which is intended for Android users and owners of the Google application on IOS, offers articles from the pro-Russian “Tsargrad”, despite the anti-war policy of the American company. Bloomberg reports this.
According to the agency, on October 6, among the recommendations there was a link to the article “A quiet big victory that was waited for a year: Russian aviation began for real,” published by Tsargrad in Zen. Bloomberg notes that the publication is spreading false information about the war in Ukraine, including accusing the Ukrainian Armed Forces of attacking the Kharkov village of Groza, where almost 60 people were killed.
Last month, Tsargrad received 200 thousand daily crossings from Google, the agency writes, without specifying which service statistics are being discussed. In addition to the publication by Konstantin Malofeev, Discover also contains links to Komsomolskaya Pravda. At the same time, according to Kirill Urban, IT director of Kommersant, the newspaper was removed from the Google system, from which 40% of all users went to the publication’s website.
Bloomberg drew attention to sites called “World War III” and “Khakassian News Agency”, which also appear in the recommendation system. The resources, the agency claims, copy verbatim the publications of Tsargrad, which increases the publication’s popularity. The former head of Yandex.News, Lev Gershenzon, noted that Google is forced to offer users articles from little-known media outlets, since it decided not to promote government publications and agencies.
A Google employee familiar with Discover said the recommendation service makes less money than the browser's search engine, which means Discover has a smaller budget to prevent abuse of the service. Two other employees of the corporation explained the appearance of pro-war media in the collections of articles as an internal problem.
Google Discover is a personalized recommendation feed, one of the sources of free traffic for websites. Collections of news and other publications are formed due to several factors: information provided by the user when registering with Google, his search queries, geotargeting and location, content display settings and user behavior. It is officially impossible to buy a place in the recommendations feed.
Previously, Google introduced restrictions against “Tsargrad” on its other service, YouTube. The publication's channel was blocked in July 2020 due to US sanctions against Malofeev. After several lawsuits, access to the channel was partially restored. “This account has been blocked for violating the YouTube Terms of Use,” it now says when clicking on the link to the Tsargrad channel.